| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: 'You love me then?' said be, fervently pressing my hand.
'Yes.'
Here I pause. My Diary, from which I have compiled these pages,
goes but little further. I could go on for years, but I will
content myself with adding, that I shall never forget that glorious
summer evening, and always remember with delight that steep hill,
and the edge of the precipice where we stood together, watching the
splendid sunset mirrored in the restless world of waters at our
feet - with hearts filled with gratitude to heaven, and happiness,
and love - almost too full for speech.
A few weeks after that, when my mother had supplied herself with an
Agnes Grey |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!"
I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with my hands.
After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on
volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--
I can call them nothing else--the strange, dizzy lift or swim
(I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had
nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we
might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened
exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano.
Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there.
Though they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say,
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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 Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: tyrant and afterwards to have a happy life; but when he had held the
tyranny three or four days, he was in his turn conspired against and slain.
Or look at certain of our own citizens,--and of their actions we have been
not hearers, but eyewitnesses,--who have desired to obtain military
command: of those who have gained their object, some are even to this day
exiles from the city, while others have lost their lives. And even they
who seem to have fared best, have not only gone through many perils and
terrors during their office, but after their return home they have been
beset by informers worse than they once were by their foes, insomuch that
several of them have wished that they had remained in a private station
rather than have had the glories of command. If, indeed, such perils and
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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 Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: adventurers were, no doubt, stirred and incited by a grim,
Calvinistic, puritanical zeal for Protestantism. But equally
beyond doubt the gold and silver and plate of the "Scarlet Woman"
had much to do with the persistent energy with which these hardy
mariners braved the mysterious, unknown terrors of the great
unknown ocean that stretched away to the sunset, there in faraway
waters to attack the huge, unwieldy, treasure-laden galleons that
sailed up and down the Caribbean Sea and through the Bahama
Channel.
Of all ghastly and terrible things old-time religious war was the
most ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
