| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: her and she said no more. And yet as our lips met I thought of
Otomie, remembering her words, and remembering also that she had
died by her own hand on this very day a year ago.
Let us pray that the dead have no vision of the living!
CHAPTER XL
AMEN
And now there is little left for me to tell and my tale draws to
its end, for which I am thankful, for I am very old and writing is
a weariness to me, so great a weariness indeed that many a time
during the past winter I have been near to abandoning the task.
For a while Lily and I sat almost silent in this same room where I
 Montezuma's Daughter |
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 An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: give these asses any other answer to their useless braying about
that word "sola" than simply "Luther will have it so, and he says
that he is a doctor above all the papal doctors." Let it remain
at that. I will, from now on, hold them in contempt, and have
already held them in contempt, as long as they are the kind of
people that they are - asses, I should say. And there are brazen
idiots among them who have never learned their own art of
sophistry - like Dr. Schmidt and Snot-Nose, and such like them.
They set themselves against me in this matter, which not only
transcends sophistry, but as St. Paul writes, all the wisdom and
understanding in the world as well. An ass truly does not have to
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