| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action
of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and
intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical
practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths,
and there was still scientific work to be done which might have
seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did
not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts
in the living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis;
but it was open to another mind to say, have not these structures
some common basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet,
gauze, net, satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: preposterous; for as to Dantzic, the Baltic would have been frozen
up and I could not get passage; and to go by land in those
countries was far less safe than among the Mogul Tartars; likewise,
as to Archangel in October, all the ships would be gone from
thence, and even the merchants who dwell there in summer retire
south to Moscow in the winter, when the ships are gone; so that I
could have nothing but extremity of cold to encounter, with a
scarcity of provisions, and must lie in an empty town all the
winter. Therefore, upon the whole, I thought it much my better way
to let the caravan go, and make provision to winter where I was, at
Tobolski, in Siberia, in the latitude of about sixty degrees, where
Robinson Crusoe |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: passage as an infidelity to art.
We have now the matter of this difference before us. The
idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines,
loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the
conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in
tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine
intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so
dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-
pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the
eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once
chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and
|
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 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: stared Lancer Theodule intently in the eyes, and said to him:--
"You are a fool."
BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS
CHAPTER I
THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES
Marius was, at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature,
with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow,
well-opened and passionate nostrils, an air of calmness and sincerity,
and with something indescribably proud, thoughtful, and innocent
over his whole countenance. His profile, all of whose lines
were rounded, without thereby losing their firmness, had a certain
Les Miserables |
