| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: would know well. By what series of undeserved calamities
this innocent flower of maidenhood, lovely, refined by
education, ennobled by the finest taste, was thus cast among
the horrors of a Mormon caravan, I must not stay to tell you.
Let it suffice, that even in these untoward circumstances,
she found a heart worthy of her own. The ardour of
attachment which united my father and mother was perhaps
partly due to the strange manner of their meeting; it knew,
at least, no bounds either divine or human; my father, for
her sake, determined to renounce his ambitions and abjure his
faith; and a week had not yet passed upon the march before he
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: looked like an old woman, wrinkled and withered; her complexion, once
rosy, would have coarsened; but Paris, though it paled her, had
preserved her beauty. Illness, toil, and grief had endowed her with
the mysterious gifts of melancholy, the inward vitalizing thought,
which is lacking to poor country-folk whose lives are almost animal.
Her dress, full of that Parisian taste which all women, even the least
coquettish, contract so readily, distinguished her still further from
an ordinary peasant-woman. In her ignorance as to what was before her,
and having no means of judging Madame Graslin, she appeared very shy
and shame-faced.
"Do you still love Farrabesche?" asked Veronique, when Grossetete left
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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 Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: I had set my heart on your forgiving him
Before you knew. We MUST forgive the dead.'
`Dead! who is dead?'
`The man your eye pursued.
A little after you had parted with him,
He suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease.'
`Dead? he? of heart-disease? what heart had he
To die of? dead!'
`Ah, dearest, if there be
A devil in man, there is an angel too,
And if he did that wrong you charge him with,
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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 Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: records that have come down to us, we may
perhaps get something like a proportion between the different
periods. That is to say, half a million years for
the purely animal man in his different forms and grades of
evolution. Then somewhere towards the end of palaeolithic
or commencement of neolithic times Self-consciousness dimly
beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow germination
and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic
period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago,
and to-day (we hope), reaching the climax which precedes
or foretells its abatement and transformation.
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
