| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: in the cloister garden.
The stars were out, strewn thick and close in the deep blue of
the sky, the milky way glowing like a silver veil. Ursa Major
wheeled gigantic in the north. The great nebula in Orion was a
whorl of shimmering star dust. Venus flamed a lambent disk of
pale saffron, low over the horizon. From edge to edge of the
world marched the constellations, like the progress of emperors,
and from the innumerable glory of their courses a mysterious
sheen of diaphanous light disengaged itself, expanding over all
the earth, serene, infinite, majestic.
The little garden revealed itself but dimly beneath the brooding
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: mass of the sun was diffused in every direction beyond the orbit
of Neptune, and no planet had an individual existence, for all
were indistinguishable parts of the solar mass. When the great
mass of the sun, increased by the relatively small mass of all
the planets put together, was spread out in this way, it was a
rare vapour or gas. At the period where the question is taken up
in Laplace's treatment of the nebular theory, the shape of this
mass is regarded as spheroidal; but at an earlier period its
shape may well have been as irregular as that of any of the
nebulae which we now see in distant parts of the heavens, for,
whatever its primitive shape, the equalization of its rotation
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
