| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents;
there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs
changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over
the almost endless creations of the last century; and there,
if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history
with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which
the favorite volume always opened:
"ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.
"Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth,
daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of
Gloucester, by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth,
Persuasion |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: And when the light-foot mower went afield
Across the meadows laced with threaded dew,
And the sheep bleated on the misty weald,
And from its nest the waking corncrake flew,
Some woodmen saw him lying by the stream
And marvelled much that any lad so beautiful could seem,
Nor deemed him born of mortals, and one said,
'It is young Hylas, that false runaway
Who with a Naiad now would make his bed
Forgetting Herakles,' but others, 'Nay,
It is Narcissus, his own paramour,
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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 Philebus by Plato: There seems to be an allusion to the passage in the Gorgias, in which
Socrates dilates on the pleasures of itching and scratching. Nor is there
any real discrepancy in the manner in which Gorgias and his art are spoken
of in the two dialogues. For Socrates is far from implying that the art of
rhetoric has a real sphere of practical usefulness: he only means that the
refutation of the claims of Gorgias is not necessary for his present
purpose. He is saying in effect: 'Admit, if you please, that rhetoric is
the greatest and usefullest of sciences:--this does not prove that
dialectic is not the purest and most exact.' From the Sophist and
Statesman we know that his hostility towards the sophists and rhetoricians
was not mitigated in later life; although both in the Statesman and Laws he
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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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: miseries were certain to increase. And why were all these poor
wretches suffering the extremity of horror, but because they would
not believe in miraculous images, and bones of dead friars, and the
rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius
had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason
and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble
indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold
his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet
uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some
word worthy of a German man?
As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be
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