| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in
the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop
thief!" whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink
from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.
And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic,
our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at
work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his
fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably,
overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible
whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims
of our "dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: strike the final balance when we are sure that our happiest
experiment has been completed."
We are not sure of that, even yet. We are still engaged, as a
committee of two, in our philosophical investigation, and we decline
to make anything but a report of progress. We know more now than we
did when we first went honeymooning in the city of Washington. For
one thing, we are certain that not even the far-famed rosemary-
fields of Narbonne, or the fragrant hillsides of the Corbieres,
yield a sweeter harvest to the busy-ness of the bees than the
Norwegian meadows and mountain-slopes yielded to our idleness in the
summer of 1888.
|
