| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: sometimes picturesque. Believe me when I say that
nothing stranger has ever befallen me than to find
out here on the lonely brink of a continent nearly
twenty thousand versts from Europe, a girl of six-
teen with the grand manner, and an intellect with-
out the detestable idiosyncrasies of the fashionable
bas bleus I have hitherto had the misfortune to en-
counter."
She was tapping the table slowly with her fork,
and he noted that her soft, childish mouth was set.
"No doubt you are quite right to put me off," she
Rezanov |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: is pretty large, and the old house, like other places of the
kind, does not possess so much accommodation as the extent of the
outward walls appears to promise. But we can give you a
comfortable old-fashioned room, and I venture to suppose that
your campaigns have taught you to be glad of worse quarters."
The General shrugged his shoulders, and laughed. "I presume," he
said, "the worst apartment in your chateau is considerably
superior to the old tobacco-cask in which I was fain to take up
my night's lodging when I was in the Bush, as the Virginians call
it, with the light corps. There I lay, like Diogenes himself, so
delighted with my covering from the elements, that I made a vain
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea,
wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and
on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures
all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or
speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I
ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his
funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of
earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid
Moby Dick |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: manner accordant with its own nature. Now one has parts or others, and has
therefore a beginning, middle, and end, of which the beginning is first and
the end last. And the parts come into existence first; last of all the
whole, contemporaneously with the end, being therefore younger, while the
parts or others are older than the one. But, again, the one comes into
being in each of the parts as much as in the whole, and must be of the same
age with them. Therefore one is at once older and younger than the parts
or others, and also contemporaneous with them, for no part can be a part
which is not one. Is this true of becoming as well as being? Thus much
may be affirmed, that the same things which are older or younger cannot
become older or younger in a greater degree than they were at first by the
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