| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: it within their own. For over two years they have been delivered from
the power of the cursed drink. The old rookery is gone, and now they
have a comfortably-furnished home. Their children give evidence of
being truly converted, and have a lively gratitude for their father's
salvation. One boy of eight said, last Christmas Day, "I remember when
we had only dry bread for Christmas; but to-day we had a goose and two
plum-puddings." Brother X. was dismissed in disgrace from his
situation as commercial traveller before his conversion; to-day he is
chief man, next to his employer, in a large business house.
He says: --
I and perfectly satisfied that very few of the lowest strata of Society
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: I had meant to go on for a great while, and say all manner of
entertaining things. But all's gone. I am now an idiot. - Yours
ever,
R. L. S.
Letter: TO W. E. HENLEY
[CHALET AM STEIN, DAVOS, MARCH 1882.]
MY DEAR HENLEY, - . . . Last night we had a dinner-party,
consisting of the John Addington, curry, onions (lovely onions),
and beefsteak. So unusual is any excitement, that F. and I feel
this morning as if we had been to a coronation. However I must, I
suppose, write.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: finger rotting and discolored with gangrene--or one with livid
scarlet wounds half escaped from their filthy bandages. These
desperate ones were the dregs of the city's cesspools, wretches
who hid at night in the rain-soaked cellars of old ramshackle
tenements, in "stale-beer dives" and opium joints, with abandoned
women in the last stages of the harlot's progress--women who had
been kept by Chinamen and turned away at last to die. Every day
the police net would drag hundreds of them off the streets, and
in the detention hospital you might see them, herded together in
a miniature inferno, with hideous, beastly faces, bloated and
leprous with disease, laughing, shouting, screaming in all stages
|
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 Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: together; and so there is in many places a bastard breed of Breams, that
never come to be either large or good, but very numerous.
The baits good to catch this Bream are many. First, paste made of
brown bread and honey; gentles; or the brood of wasps that be young,
and then not unlike gentles, and should be hardened in an oven, or dried
on a tile before the fire to make them tough. Or, there is, at the root of
docks or flags or rushes, in watery places, a worm not unlike a maggot,
at which Tench will bite freely. Or he will bite at a grasshopper with his
legs nipt off, in June and July; or at several flies, under water, which
may be found on flags that grow near to the water-side. I doubt not but
that there be many other baits that are good; but I will turn them all into
|
