| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it. The perspiration
poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to
carry for a while a thin stream of half, frozen blood. Complete
terror had possession of him now, a nameless terror which had
turned his heart to ashes.
He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning at
his feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the end
of the table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets round
the walls, over the ceiling, over the floor, in the expectation of
a mysterious and appalling vision. The thing which could deal
death in a breath was outside that bolted door. But Byrne believed
Within the Tides |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus: to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace."
First of all he prayed in silence, and said, "Have mercy of me,
Lord God, have mercy of me; for my soul trusteth in thee; and
under the shadow of thy wings I shall hope till wickedness
overpass. I shall cry to the highest God; to God that did well
to me," and the rest of the psalm.
Then said Ioasaph to the king, "To honour one's father, and to
obey his commands, and to serve him with good will and affection
is taught us by the Lord of us all, who hath implanted in our
hearts this natural affection. But, when loving devotion to our
parents bringeth our soul into peril, and separateth her from her
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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 The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: days when fighting was a constant necessity, and when the only
honourable way for a gentleman of high rank to make money was by
freebooting, fighting came to be regarded as an end desirable in
itself; so in these days the mere effort to accumulate has become
a source of enjoyment rather than a means to it. The same truth
is to be witnessed in aberrant types of character. The infatuated
speculator and the close-fisted millionaire are our substitutes
for the mediaeval berserkir,--the man who loved the pell-mell of
a contest so well that he would make war on his neighbour, just
to keep his hand in. In like manner, while such crimes as murder
and violent robbery have diminished in frequency during the past
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
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 An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: large wants and their own narrow needs without working themselves
to death. But my grandfather was a shrewd man. He perceived that
cows and sheep produced more money by their meat and wool than
peasants by their husbandry. So he cleared the estate. That is,
he drove the peasants from their homes, as my father did
afterwards in his Scotch deer forest. Or, as his tombstone has
it, he developed the resources of his country. I don't know what
became of the peasants; HE didn't know, and, I presume, didn't
care. I suppose the old ones went into the workhouse, and the
young ones crowded the towns, and worked for men like my father
in factories. Their places were taken by cattle, which paid for
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