The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: meaning, syllable by syllable--nay, letter by letter. For though it
is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of
signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books
is called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by
the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books,
or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature
this real fact:- that you might read all the books in the British
Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly
"illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a
good book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--
you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. The entire
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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 The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs: last of the creatures through the outer doorway of the
workshop into the north campong.
Among the age old arts of the celestials none is more
strangely inspiring than that of medicine. Odd herbs
and unspeakable things when properly compounded under
a favorable aspect of the heavenly bodies are potent
to achieve miraculous cures, and few are the Chinamen
who do not brew some special concoction of their own
devising for the lesser ills which beset mankind.
Sing was no exception in this respect. In various
queerly shaped, bamboo covered jars he maintained
The Monster Men |