| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that.
Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the
urban John Bull, had his fling with gin bottle and obese
umbrella, or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared
and reappeared, visiting this, opening that, getting married,
getting offspring, lying in state, doing everything but anything,
a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race apart.
I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my
mind is one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a
maturer charity. All its effects arranged themselves as
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: yet more awful radiance was hovering around the pulpit, and one
solitary ray had dared to rest upon the open page of the great
Bible. Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the
house which man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the
visible sanctity of the place,--visible because no earthly and
impure feet were within the walls? The scene made Robin's heart
shiver with a sensation of loneliness stronger than he had ever
felt in the remotest depths of his native woods; so he turned
away and sat down again before the door. There were graves around
the church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded into Robin's
breast. What if the object of his search, which had been so often
The Snow Image |
