| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: 'He's dead, too, twelve year gone or more; he drank hisself to dead
he did. And Mr. Thomas, he's dead, drowned over seas they say,
many a winter back; they're all dead, all dead! Ah! he was a rare
one, Mr. Thomas was; I mind me well how when I let the furriner go--'
and he rambled off into the tale of how he had set de Garcia on
his horse after I had beaten him, nor could I bring him back from
it.
Casting him a piece of money, I set spurs to my weary horse and
cantered up the bridle path, leaving the Mill House on my left, and
as I went, the beat of his hoofs seemed to echo the old man's
words, 'All dead, all dead!' Doubtless Lily was dead also, or if
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: have the lesson just so or else break his heart (not somebody else's,
observe), yet his school is so fascinating that every woman who sees
it exclaims "Oh, why was I not taught like this!" and elderly
gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves as students and distract classes
of infants by their desperate endeavors to beat two in a bar with one
hand and three with the other, and start off on earnest walks round
the room, taking two steps backward whenever Monsieur Daleroze calls
out "Hop!" Oh yes: I know all about these wonderful schools that you
cannot keep children or even adults out of, and these teachers whom
their pupils not only obey without coercion, but adore. And if you
will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris and Dalcrozes you
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: chaotic romance to account for the meeting of these three persons
under her humble roof. She hunted through the chest, examined
everything, but could find nothing extraordinary. She saw nothing on
the table but a writing-case and some sheets of parchment; and as she
could not read, this discovery told her nothing. A woman's instinct
then took her into the young man's room, and from thence she descried
her two lodgers crossing the river in the ferry boat.
"They stand like two statues," said she to herself. "Ah, ha! They are
landing at the Rue du Fouarre. How nimble he is, the sweet youth! He
jumped out like a bird. By him the old man looks like some stone saint
in the Cathedral.--They are going to the old School of the Four
|
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 Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: are unfavourable. It was morally reprehensible for that great
captain to induce a simple-minded Polish gentleman to eat dog by
raising in his breast a false hope of national independence. It
has been the fate of that credulous nation to starve for upwards
of a hundred years on a diet of false hopes and--well--dog. It
is, when one thinks of it, a singularly poisonous regimen. Some
pride in the national constitution which has survived a long
course of such dishes is really excusable. But enough of
generalising. Returning to particulars, Mr. Nicholas B. confided
to his sister-in-law (my grandmother) in his misanthropically
laconic manner that this supper in the woods had been nearly "the
Some Reminiscences |
