| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: immediately there was a fluttering rush of a slender woman clad
in lavender down the steps. This woman first kissed Eudora with
gentle fervor, then, with a sly look around and voice raised
intentionally high, she lifted the blue and white roll from the
carriage with the tenderest care. "Did the darling come to see
his aunties?" she shrilled.
The old man and the boy in the front yard heard her distinctly.
The old man's face was imperturbable. The boy grinned.
Two other women, all clad in lavender, appeared in the doorway.
They also bent over the blue and white bundle. They also said
something about the darling coming to see his aunties. Then
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: Aristotle, but Aristotle by Plato. Of all philosophy and of all art the
true understanding is to be sought not in the afterthoughts of posterity,
but in the elements out of which they have arisen. For the previous stage
is a tendency towards the ideal at which they are aiming; the later is a
declination or deviation from them, or even a perversion of them. No man's
thoughts were ever so well expressed by his disciples as by himself.
But although Plato in the Philebus does not come into any close connexion
with Aristotle, he is now a long way from himself and from the beginnings
of his own philosophy. At the time of his death he left his system still
incomplete; or he may be more truly said to have had no system, but to have
lived in the successive stages or moments of metaphysical thought which
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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 Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: If I might teach thee wit, better it were,
Though not to love, yet, love to tell me so;--
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near,
No news but health from their physicians know;--
For, if I should despair, I should grow mad,
And in my madness might speak ill of thee;
Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,
Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be.
That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.
CXLI
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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 The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: thought--Korak, her Korak always was first.
Chapter 15
And out in the jungle, far away, Korak, covered with wounds,
stiff with clotted blood, burning with rage and sorrow, swung
back upon the trail of the great baboons. He had not found them
where he had last seen them, nor in any of their usual haunts;
but he sought them along the well-marked spoor they had left
behind them, and at last he overtook them. When first he came
upon them they were moving slowly but steadily southward in
one of those periodic migrations the reasons for which the baboon
himself is best able to explain. At sight of the white warrior
The Son of Tarzan |
