| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: The vision that he wing'd and sped
Falls backward, baffled, from the height;
Yet in the wreck of these he stands
Upheld by something grim and strong;
Some stubborn instinct lifts a song
And nerves him, heart and hands:
He does not dare to call it hope;--
It is not aught that seeks reward--
Nor faith, that up some sunward slope
Runs aureoled to meet its lord;
It touches something elder far
|
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 Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a
long line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossed
up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among the
scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds
of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons of
rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the
beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great
word across the surface of the country, and that word was 'fever.'
"It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one
little kraal of Knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some
'maas', or curdled butter-milk, and a few mealies. As I drew near I was
 Long Odds |