| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters: To warn an unjust judge of destiny:
I, slumbering, heard and saw; awake I know,
Christ's coming death, and Pilate's life of woe.
I do not weep for Pilate--who could prove
Regret for him whose cold and crushing sway
No prayer can soften, no appeal can move:
Who tramples hearts as others trample clay,
Yet with a faltering, an uncertain tread,
That might stir up reprisal in the dead.
Forced to sit by his side and see his deeds;
Forced to behold that visage, hour by hour,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished
the DECLINE AND FALL, he had only a few moments of joy; and it
was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.
Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows;
our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end
of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow
themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the
child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it
is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have
seen it through its teething and its education, and at last
its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new
|
