| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: "you know too well the risk belonging to these two terrible
words, 'art and part.'" Then, as if to himself, he recited the
following lines:
"The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs,
And pointed full upon the stroke of murder.
"What is that you are talking to yourself?" said
Craigengelt, turning back with some anxiety.
"Nothing, only two lines I have heard upon the stage," replied
his companion.
"Bucklaw," said Craigengelt, "I sometimes think you should have
been a stage-player yourself; all is fancy and frolic with you."
The Bride of Lammermoor |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: reaches in the "sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in
an orchard, and the superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat
and dainty, was too wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all
sizes in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky Run, came
tumbling down opposite the inn, as if made to order for juvenile
use.
How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling
sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The
water, except just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass--
old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a
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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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than
usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had
said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-
of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he
groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she
guessed what he was thinking--he would have written better books if he
had not married.
He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain.
She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized
her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that
To the Lighthouse |
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 Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: Kaptein. Slowly, and with the greatest care, I proceeded up the kloof,
searching every bush and tuft of grass as I went. It was wonderfully
exciting, work, for I never was sure from one moment to another but that
he would be on me. I took comfort, however, from the reflection that a
lion rarely attacks a man--rarely, I say; sometimes he does, as you will
see--unless he is cornered or wounded. I must have been nearly an hour
hunting after that lion. Once I thought I saw something move in a clump
of tambouki grass, but I could not be sure, and when I trod out the
grass I could not find him.
"At last I worked up to the head of the kloof, which made a cul-de-sac.
It was formed of a wall of rock about fifty feet high. Down this rock
Long Odds |
