| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: mankind. It must have been - to a day or two. But on this evening
it wasn't merely loneliness that I felt. I felt bereaved with a
sense of a complete and universal loss in which there was perhaps
more resentment than mourning; as if the world had not been taken
away from me by an august decree but filched from my innocence by
an underhand fate at the very moment when it had disclosed to my
passion its warm and generous beauty. This consciousness of
universal loss had this advantage that it induced something
resembling a state of philosophic indifference. I walked up to the
railway station caring as little for the cold blasts of wind as
though I had been going to the scaffold. The delay of the train
The Arrow of Gold |
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 Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death by Patrick Henry: We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the
song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part
of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?
Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not,
and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their
temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost,
I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of
experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.
And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct
of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with
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