| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: Ignorant, as all young girls are, of the perils of love and marriage,
she was passionately captivated by the externals of marriage and love.
Is not this as much as to say that her feeling had birth like all the
feelings of extreme youth--sweet but cruel mistakes, which exert a
fatal influence on the lives of young girls so inexperienced as to
trust their own judgment to take care of their future happiness?
Next morning, before Emilie was awake, her uncle had hastened to
Chevreuse. On recognizing, in the courtyard of an elegant little
villa, the young man he had so determinedly insulted the day before,
he went up to him with the pressing politeness of men of the old
court.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: a peculiar tie to the black silk neckerchief."
Though Dana sailed from Boston only three-quarters of a century
ago, much that is at present obsolete was then in full sway. For
instance, the old word LARBOARD was still in use. He was a member
of the LARBOARD watch. The vessel was on the LARBOARD tack. It
was only the other day, because of its similarity in sound to
starboard, that LARBOARD was changed to PORT. Try to imagine "All
larboard bowlines on deck!" being shouted down into the forecastle
of a present day ship. Yet that was the call used on the Pilgrim
to fetch Dana and the rest of his watch on deck.
The chronometer, which is merely the least imperfect time-piece
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: not every love, but only that which has a noble purpose, is noble and
worthy of praise. The Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is
essentially common, and has no discrimination, being such as the meaner
sort of men feel, and is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of
the body rather than of the soul--the most foolish beings are the objects
of this love which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of
accomplishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite
indiscriminately. The goddess who is his mother is far younger than the
other, and she was born of the union of the male and female, and partakes
of both. But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a
mother in whose birth the female has no part,--she is from the male only;
|
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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-
two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of
spread.
Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to
eighteen feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is
that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield.
Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise. The "great tree"
on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at
Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as
round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of
others which might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
