| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses
of the cathedrals of the earth. Your ONE conception of pleasure is
to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their
altars. {16} You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of
Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's
chapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva;
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled with
bellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which you
have not trampled coal ashes into {17}--nor any foreign city in
which the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old
streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotels
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: rheumaticky place in England, and some fine day the whole
habitable part (to call it habitable) would fetch away bodily
and go down the slope into the river. He had seen the cracks
widening; there was a plaguy issue in the bank below; he
thought a spring was mining it; it might be tomorrow, it
might be next day; but they were all sure of a come-down
sooner or later. 'And that is a poor death,' said he, 'for
any one, let alone a gentleman, to have a whole old ruin
dumped upon his belly. Have a care to your left there; these
cellar vaults have all broke down, and the grass and hemlock
hide 'em. Well, sir, here is welcome to you, such as it is,
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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 In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: If it could be made possible for the joyless toilers to come out of the
sweater's den, or the stifling factory; if the seamstress could leave
her needle, and the mother get away from the weary round of babydom and
household drudgery for a day now and then, to the cooling,
invigorating, heart-stirring influences of the sea, it should be done,
even if it did cost a few paltry thousands. Let the men and women who
spend a little fortune every year in Continental tours, Alpine
climbings, yacht excursions, and many another form of luxurious
wanderings, come forward and say that it shall be possible for these
crowds of their less fortunate brethren to have the opportunity of
spending one day at least in the year by the sea.
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
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 Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: could advise his friends to change their hunting-grounds;
but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the lazy, fat Inuit
fashion, over the other boys, when they came out at night to
play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child's Song to the
Aurora Borealis.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was
tired of making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most
tired of all of helping the women to chew seal- and deer-skins
(that supples them as nothing else can) the long day through,
while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi,
the Singing-House, when the hunters gathered there for their
The Second Jungle Book |
