| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: hopes of the man are mocked at by the hopes of hell in the tremendous
cry: '/A toi, Robert de Normandie/!'
"And are not you struck by the gloom and horror of those long-held
notes, to which the words are set: '/Dans la foret prochaine/'? We
find here all the sinister spells of /Jerusalem Delivered/, just as we
find all chivalry in the chorus with the Spanish lilt, and in the
march tune. How original is the /alegro/ with the modulations of the
four cymbals (tuned to C, D, C, G)! How elegant is the call to the
lists! The whole movement of the heroic life of the period is there:
the mind enters into it; I read in it a romance, a poem of chivalry.
The /exposition/ is now finished; the resources of music would seem to
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: loveliest amid a whole bevy of beauties), even so did the girl
outshine her handmaids.
When it was time for them to start home, and they were folding
the clothes and putting them into the waggon, Minerva began to
consider how Ulysses should wake up and see the handsome girl
who was to conduct him to the city of the Phaeacians. The girl,
therefore, threw a ball at one of the maids, which missed her
and fell into deep water. On this they all shouted, and the
noise they made woke Ulysses, who sat up in his bed of leaves
and began to wonder what it might all be.
"Alas," said he to himself, "what kind of people have I come
The Odyssey |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker: well-hole; I realised what freedom meant. Freedom! Freedom! Not
only from that noisome prison-house, which has now such a memory,
but from the more noisome embrace of that hideous monster. Whilst I
live, I shall always thank you for my freedom. A woman must
sometimes express her gratitude; otherwise it becomes too great to
bear. I am not a sentimental girl, who merely likes to thank a man;
I am a woman who knows all, of bad as well as good, that life can
give. I have known what it is to love and to lose. But you must
not let me bring any unhappiness into your life. I must live on--as
I have lived--alone, and, in addition, bear with other woes the
memory of this latest insult and horror. In the meantime, I must
Lair of the White Worm |
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 My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: to get me again into slavery, a condition I then dreaded more
than death.
I soon learned, however, to count money, as well as to make it,
and got on swimmingly. I married soon after leaving you; in
fact, I was engaged to be married before I left you; and instead
of finding my companion a burden, she was truly a helpmate. She
went to live at service, and I to work on the wharf, and though
we toiled hard the first winter, we never lived more happily.
After remaining in New Bedford for three years, I met with
William Lloyd Garrison, a person of whom you have _possibly_
heard, as he is pretty generally known among slaveholders. He
My Bondage and My Freedom |
