| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: As well as any in the land.
Could he have made Priscilla cease
To goad him for what God left out,
Llewellyn would have been as mild
As any we have read about.
Could all have been as all was not,
Llewellyn would have had no story;
He would have stayed a quiet man
And gone his quiet way to glory.
But howsoever mild he was
Priscilla was implacable;
|
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 Straight Deal by Owen Wister: the Union and the abolition of slavery were so tightly wrapped together
as to merge and be one and the same thing. But even had he known this
from the start, known that the North's bottom cause, the ending of
slavery, rested on moral ground, and that moral ground outweighs and must
forever outweigh whatever of legal argument may be on the other side, he
could have done nothing. "I believe I have no lawful right." There were
thousands in the North who also thus believed. It was only an extremist
minority who disregarded the Constitution's acquiescence in slavery and
wanted emancipation proclaimed at once. Had Lincoln proclaimed it, the
North would have split in pieces, the South would have won, the Union
would have perished, and slavery would have remained. Lincoln had to wait
|
