| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: fresh evidence. In a sense, it is even so. Damien has been too
much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features;
so drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to
express the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and
silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy for myself -
such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on your
bended knees. It is the least defect of such a method of
portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate,
and leaves the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of
truth. For the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest
weapon of the enemy. The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have
never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody
itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain;
but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale
with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot
thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those
parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging
along in their regular sequences of association. No wonder the
ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced] Goddess, - Muse, - divine afflatus, -
something outside always. I never wrote any verses worth reading.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: art or in nature, it owed its several motions, whereof I will now
give a philosophical account to the reader.
The flying or floating island is exactly circular, its diameter
7837 yards, or about four miles and a half, and consequently
contains ten thousand acres. It is three hundred yards thick.
The bottom, or under surface, which appears to those who view it
below, is one even regular plate of adamant, shooting up to the
height of about two hundred yards. Above it lie the several
minerals in their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich
mould, ten or twelve feet deep. The declivity of the upper
surface, from the circumference to the centre, is the natural
Gulliver's Travels |
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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. (She
wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes the wind took them and she and
Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what a power was in the
human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there writing under the
rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers,
irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that
and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite
(she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful)
something--this scene on the beach for example, this moment of
friendship and liking--which survived, after all these years complete,
so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there
To the Lighthouse |
