| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: of the work, and plausible reasons are given why in
the defective part less ornament was necessary, or
less could be admitted. But, perhaps, the author
would have confessed, that his fancy was tired, and
his perseverance broken; that he knew his design
to be unfinished, but that, when he saw the end so
near, he could no longer refuse to be at rest.
Against the instillations of this frigid opiate, the
heart should be secured by all the considerations
which once concurred to kindle the ardour of enterprise.
Whatever motive first incited action, has still
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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 Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: springing from rock to rock, undismayed at the abyss--a hundred
fathoms deep and only six feet wide--which yawns beneath them. Here a
tottering block of gneiss falling athwart two rocks gives an uncertain
footway; there the hunters or the fishermen, carrying their loads,
have flung the stems of fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the
projecting reefs, around and beneath which the surges roar
incessantly. This dangerous entrance to the little bay bears obliquely
to the right with a serpentine movement, and there encounters a
mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level, the
base of which is a vertical palisade of solid rock more than a mile
and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere yielding to clefts or
Seraphita |
