The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: tithes against their conscience to an episcopal curate.
Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something valuable of
their own, which by law may be made liable to a distress, and
help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being
already seized, and money a thing unknown.
Thirdly, Whereas the maintainance of an hundred thousand
children, from two years old, and upwards, cannot be computed at
less than ten shillings a piece per annum, the nation's stock
will be thereby encreased fifty thousand pounds per annum,
besides the profit of a new dish, introduced to the tables of all
gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom, who have any refinement in
 A Modest Proposal |
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 The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute music
must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an
exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great
geniuses produce this illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement:
he consummated it. He was the summit of the nineteenth century
school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the
summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth century school.
And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will
assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of
second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected
supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the
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