| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we
cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of
Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a
journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for TRISTRAM
SHANDY I can pledge a fair experience.
If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better
in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or
lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and
the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste
Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word.
Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: recollection from an elder world. Of this the enquirers of the seventeenth
century, who to themselves appeared to be working out independently the
enquiry into all truth, were unconscious. They stood in a new relation to
theology and natural philosophy, and for a time maintained towards both an
attitude of reserve and separation. Yet the similarities between modern
and ancient thought are greater far than the differences. All philosophy,
even that part of it which is said to be based upon experience, is really
ideal; and ideas are not only derived from facts, but they are also prior
to them and extend far beyond them, just as the mind is prior to the
senses.
Early Greek speculation culminates in the ideas of Plato, or rather in the
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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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in
Lear's scene with Edgar - a passage which has the advantage of
brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing
metaphysics of SARTOR RESARTUS. But I think that from what I have
already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much
interested in costume. I do not mean in that shallow sense by
which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and
daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan
age; but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressive
of a certain effect on the audience and expressive of certain types
of character, and is one of the essential factors of the means
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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 A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: Kazbich, only I could not make out what it was
that he was holding in front of him.
"Then I drew level with Pechorin and shouted
to him:
"'It is Kazbich!'
"He looked at me, nodded, and struck his
horse with his whip.
"At last we were within gunshot of Kazbich.
Whether it was that his horse was jaded or
not so good as ours, I don't know, but, in
spite of all his efforts, it did not get along very
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