| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: side of Dolly, who, though feeling that she was entirely in her
place in encountering cold and snow on an errand of mercy, was much
concerned at a young gentleman's getting his feet wet under a like
impulse.
"You'd a deal better go back, sir," said Dolly, with respectful
compassion. "You've no call to catch cold; and I'd ask you if
you'd be so good as tell my husband to come, on your way back--
he's at the Rainbow, I doubt--if you found him anyway sober enough
to be o' use. Or else, there's Mrs. Snell 'ud happen send the boy
up to fetch and carry, for there may be things wanted from the
doctor's."
Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: favourite loci communes, one of which, as we find in Lysias, was the
shortness of the time allowed them for preparation. But Socrates points
out that they had them always ready for delivery, and that there was no
difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the
Athenians among the Athenians was easy,--to praise them among the
Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task. Socrates
himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman, Aspasia, the
mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to
his own--say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian--would be
quite equal to the task of praising men to themselves. When we remember
that Antiphon is described by Thucydides as the best pleader of his day,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: of seeing those prisoners; but the others mistaking them, thought
they were desirous to have some of them to carry away for their own
eating. So they beckoned to them, pointing to the setting of the
sun, and then to the rising; which was to signify that the next
morning at sunrising they would bring some for them; and
accordingly the next morning they brought down five women and
eleven men, and gave them to the Englishmen to carry with them on
their voyage, just as we would bring so many cows and oxen down to
a seaport town to victual a ship.
As brutish and barbarous as these fellows were at home, their
stomachs turned at this sight, and they did not know what to do.
Robinson Crusoe |
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 Egmont by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: nothing,--betray him.
Soest. Shame on thee, Brackenburg! Let her not run on thus! Prevent the
mischief!
Brackenburg. Dear Clara! Let us go! What will your Mother say?
Perchance--
Clara. Thinkest thou I am a child, or frantic? What avails perchance?--
With no vain hope canst thou hide from me this dreadful certainty . . . Ye
shall hear me and ye will: for I see it, ye are overwhelmed, ye cannot
hearken to the voice of your own hearts. Through the present peril cast but
one glance into the past,--the recent past. Send your thoughts forward into
the future. Could ye live, would ye live, were he to perish? With him
Egmont |
