| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Adventure by Jack London: Sparrowhawk observed.
"Well, I never saw anything so black as the mangroves. I stared at
them till my eyes were ready to burst. And then I'd look at the
stars, and listen to the surf sighing along the reef. And there
was a dog that barked. Remember that dog, Sparrowhawk? The brute
nearly gave me heart-failure when he first began. After a while he
stopped--wasn't barking at the landing party at all; and then the
silence was harder than ever, and the mangroves grew blacker, and
it was all I could do to keep from calling out to Curtis in there
in the landing boat, just to make sure that I wasn't the only white
man left alive.
|
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 Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: enough then, but pure enough before it touches me--each of these,
giving off a tiny atom of what men call carbonic acid, melts a
tiny grain of chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid
hill by one of the million pores and veins which at once feed and
burden my springs. Ages on ages I have worked on thus, carrying
the chalk into the sea. And ages on ages, it may be, I shall work
on yet; till I have done my work at last, and levelled the high
downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of flint gravel rattling in
the shallow waves.
She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would
surely think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and
|
