| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: bids that ye shall come within this hour to the Moat House, there
to take command."
The old fellow looked up.
"Save you, my masters!" he said, grinning. "And where goeth Master
Hatch?"
"Master Hatch is off to Kettley, with every man that we can horse,"
returned Bennet. "There is a fight toward, it seems, and my lord
stays a reinforcement."
"Ay, verily," returned Appleyard. "And what will ye leave me to
garrison withal?"
"I leave you six good men, and Sir Oliver to boot," answered Hatch.
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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 Mansion by Henry van Dyke: years to bring them up in purity and knowledge--a Sister of
Charity
who had devoted herself to the nursing of poor folk who were
being
eaten to death by cancer--a schoolmaster whose heart and life
had been poured into his quiet work of training boys for a clean
and
thoughtful manhood--a medical missionary who had given up
a brilliant career in science to take the charge of a hospital in
darkest Africa--a beautiful woman with silver hair who had
resigned her dreams of love and marriage to care for an invalid
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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 Kenilworth by Walter Scott: has all this to do with the shoeing of my poor nag?"
"FESTINA LENTE," said the man of learning, "we will presently
came to that point. You must know that some two or three years
past there came to these parts one who called himself Doctor
Doboobie, although it may be he never wrote even MAGISTER ARTIUM,
save in right of his hungry belly. Or it may be, that if he had
any degrees, they were of the devil's giving; for he was what the
vulgar call a white witch, a cunning man, and such like.--Now,
good sir, I perceive you are impatient; but if a man tell not his
tale his own way, how have you warrant to think that he can tell
it in yours?"
Kenilworth |
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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: and the wholesale massacre which followed it, had happened but two
years before; and, by all the signs of the times, these murders and
miseries were certain to increase. And why were all these poor
wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would
not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the
rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius
had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason
and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble
indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold
his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet
uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some
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