| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: the peasant's real object might not be to go and get drunk. True, at
intervals he would say, while gazing from the verandah to the
courtyard, and from the courtyard to the pond, that it would be indeed
splendid if a carriage drive could suddenly materialise, and the pond
as suddenly become spanned with a stone bridge, and little shops as
suddenly arise whence pedlars could dispense the petty merchandise of
the kind which peasantry most need. And at such moments his eyes would
grow winning, and his features assume an expression of intense
satisfaction. Yet never did these projects pass beyond the stage of
debate. Likewise there lay in his study a book with the fourteenth
page permanently turned down. It was a book which he had been reading
Dead Souls |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs: man type of architecture, the windows were larger, the
carving more elaborate, the rooms lighter and more
spacious.
Within the great enclosure thrived a fair sized town,
for, with his ten hundred fighting-men, the Outlaw of
Torn required many squires, lackeys, cooks, scullions,
armorers, smithies, farriers, hostlers and the like to care
for the wants of his little army.
Fifteen hundred war horses, beside five hundred
sumpter beasts, were quartered in the great stables,
while the east court was alive with cows, oxen, goats,
The Outlaw of Torn |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: sacrifice of the professed object of compulsory education to the real
object of voluntary education. It is assumed that this means that
people prefer bodily to mental culture; but may it not mean that they
prefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is it
that people who have been taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe
his plays and cannot by any means be persuaded ever to open his works
after they escape from school, whereas there is still, 300 years after
his death, a wide and steady sale for his works to people who read his
plays as plays, and not as task work? If Shakespear, or for that
matter, Newton and Leibnitz, are allowed to find their readers and
students they will find them. If their works are annotated and
|
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 Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: viii. pp. 218 and 220.
[20] Cuvier (Ossemens Fossiles, tom. i. p. 151), from Billing's
Voyage.
[21] In the former edition and Appendix, I have given some
facts on the transportal of erratic boulders and icebergs
in the Atlantic Ocean. This subject has lately been treated
excellently by Mr. Hayes, in the Boston Journal (vol. iv.
p. 426). The author does not appear aware of a case published
by me (Geographical Journal, vol. ix. p. 528) of a gigantic
boulder embedded in an iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean, almost
certainly one hundred miles distant from any land, and
The Voyage of the Beagle |
