| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: 'At length?' she muttered.
'Yes, Mademoiselle.'
I saw her shiver. 'What if I will not?" she said again.
'I might call to the nearest soldiers and tell them who you are,'
I answered coolly. 'I might do that, but I should not. That
were a clumsy way of punishing you, and I know a better way. I
should go to the Captain, Mademoiselle, and tell him whose horse
is locked up in the inn stable. A trooper told me--as someone
had told him--that it belonged to one of his officers; but I
looked through the crack, and I knew the horse again.'
She could not repress a groan. I waited; still she did not
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: languish? Why did history degenerate into fable? Why did words lose their
power of expression? Why were ages of external greatness and magnificence
attended by all the signs of decay in the human mind which are possible?
To these questions many answers may be given, which if not the true causes,
are at least to be reckoned among the symptoms of the decline. There is
the want of method in physical science, the want of criticism in history,
the want of simplicity or delicacy in poetry, the want of political
freedom, which is the true atmosphere of public speaking, in oratory. The
ways of life were luxurious and commonplace. Philosophy had become
extravagant, eclectic, abstract, devoid of any real content. At length it
ceased to exist. It had spread words like plaster over the whole field of
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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 Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: and furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was
analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp
representing the premises, and the woof the conclusion.
Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred
writings as an essentially dangerous method, proving either too
much or too little, Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of
attack, and re-writes history with a didactic purpose, laying down
certain ethical canons of historical criticism. God is good; God
is just; God is true; God is without the common passions of men.
These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories of the
Greek religion.
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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 Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: and he stood now in the bright moonlight close to the rail, with
his hands behind him, looking out ahead with the utmost coolness
imaginable, and paying no more attention to the din of battle
than though it were twenty leagues away. Now and then he would
take his pipe from his lips to utter an order to the man at the
wheel. Excepting this he stood there hardly moving at all, the
wind blowing his long red hair over his shoulders.
Had it not been for the armed galley the pirates might have got
the galleon away with no great harm done in spite of all this
cannonading, for the man-of-war which rode at anchor nighest to
them at the mouth of the harbor was still so far away that they
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
