| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: Hie therefore Robin, ouercast the night,
The starrie Welkin couer thou anon,
With drooping fogge as blacke as Acheron,
And lead these testie Riuals so astray,
As one come not within anothers way.
Like to Lysander, sometime frame thy tongue,
Then stirre Demetrius vp with bitter wrong;
And sometime raile thou like Demetrius;
And from each other looke thou leade them thus,
Till ore their browes, death-counterfeiting, sleepe
With leaden legs, and Battie-wings doth creepe:
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: bachelor breakfast-party given by one of our number who had lost a bet
to a young man greatly in vogue in the fashionable world. M. de
Trailles, the flower of the dandyism of that day, enjoyed a prodigious
reputation."
"But he is still enjoying it," put in the Comte de Born. "No one wears
his clothes with a finer air, nor drives a tandem with a better grace.
It is Maxime's gift; he can gamble, eat, and drink more gracefully
than any man in the world. He is a judge of horses, hats, and
pictures. All the women lose their heads over him. He always spends
something like a hundred thousand francs a year, and no creature can
discover that he has an acre of land or a single dividend warrant. The
Gobseck |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: religion, casting aside its hulls of misconception, must ultimately
come. To it indeed much religion is already coming. Christian
thought struggles towards it, with the millstones of Syrian theology
and an outrageous mythology of incarnation and resurrection about
its neck. When at last our present bench of bishops join the early
fathers of the church in heaven there will be, I fear, a note of
reproach in their greeting of the ingenious person who saddled them
with OMNIPOTENS. Still more disastrous for them has been the virgin
birth, with the terrible fascination of its detail for unpoetic
minds. How rich is the literature of authoritative Christianity
with decisions upon the continuing virginity of Mary and the
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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 Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: melesei tis...kaka: oti pas aphron mainetai): and the writer seems to
have been acquainted with the 'Laws' of Plato (compare Laws). An incident
from the Symposium is rather clumsily introduced, and two somewhat
hackneyed quotations (Symp., Gorg.) recur. The reference to the death of
Archelaus as having occurred 'quite lately' is only a fiction, probably
suggested by the Gorgias, where the story of Archelaus is told, and a
similar phrase occurs;--ta gar echthes kai proen gegonota tauta, k.t.l.
There are several passages which are either corrupt or extremely ill-
expressed. But there is a modern interest in the subject of the dialogue;
and it is a good example of a short spurious work, which may be attributed
to the second or third century before Christ.
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