| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: So he was tossed in spirit; now bewailing his inconsequence and lack
of temper, now flaming up in white-hot indignation and a noble pity
for himself.
He paced his apartment like a leopard. There was danger in Otto,
for a flash. Like a pistol, he could kill at one moment, and the
next he might he kicked aside. But just then, as he walked the long
floors in his alternate humours, tearing his handkerchief between
his hands, he was strung to his top note, every nerve attent. The
pistol, you might say, was charged. And when jealousy from time to
time fetched him a lash across the tenderest of his feeling, and
sent a string of her fire-pictures glancing before his mind's eye,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: who was opening and shutting it so often, moving so restlessly about,
and muttering like the soliloquy of a tragedy-queen!
No, it was a female voice. Also the figure half-hidden by the
cupboard-door--was a female figure, massive, and in flowing robes,
Could it be the landlady? The door opened, and a strange man entered
the room.
"What is that donkey doing?" he said to himself, pausing, aghast,
on the threshold.
The lady, thus rudely referred to, was his wife. She had got one of
the cupboards open, and stood with her back to him, smoothing down a
sheet of brown paper on one of the shelves, and whispering to herself
Sylvie and Bruno |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: Part curb their fiery steeds, or shun the goal
With rapid wheels, or fronted brigades form:
As when, to warn proud cities, war appears
Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush
To battle in the clouds; before each van
Prick forth the airy knights, and couch their spears,
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of heaven the welkin burns.
Others, with vast Typhoean rage, more fell,
Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air
In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wild uproar:--
Paradise Lost |
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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: man can possess, or of which he can form any proper notion."
And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of
necessity to be preceded by despair is shown by Edwards in
another passage.
"Surely it cannot be unreasonable," he says, "that before God
delivers us from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe,
he should give us some considerable sense of the evil from which
he delivers us, in order that we may know and feel the importance
of salvation, and be enabled to appreciate the value of what God
is pleased to do for us. As those who are saved are successively
in two extremely different states--first in a state of
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