| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: The lily's singing seneschal
Sleeps in the lily-bell, and all
The violet hills are lost in gloom.
O risen moon! O holy moon!
Stand on the top of Helice,
And if my own true love you see,
Ah! if you see the purple shoon,
The hazel crook, the lad's brown hair,
The goat-skin wrapped about his arm,
Tell him that I am waiting where
The rushlight glimmers in the Farm.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: benevolent patience which is generally a sign of the
magistrate's being interested for the prisoner, or of a
man's having so completely got the better of his adversary
that he needs no longer any oppressive means to ruin him.
Cornelius did not accept of this hypocritical protection,
and in a last answer, which he set forth with the noble
bearing of a martyr and the calm serenity of a righteous
man, he said, --
"You ask me things, gentlemen, to which I can answer only
the exact truth. Hear it. The parcel was put into my hands
in the way I have described; I vow before God that I was,
The Black Tulip |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man. The Norseman--the
noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history
can tell us--was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native
forests that he had "ten men's strength and eleven men's wisdom."
How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle
Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating
theorem--that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole,
guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower
animals? I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan:
Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.
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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 Lysis by Plato: only, and the good was supposed to have no friendship with the evil?
None.
And therefore we say that those who are already wise, whether Gods or men,
are no longer lovers of wisdom; nor can they be lovers of wisdom who are
ignorant to the extent of being evil, for no evil or ignorant person is a
lover of wisdom. There remain those who have the misfortune to be
ignorant, but are not yet hardened in their ignorance, or void of
understanding, and do not as yet fancy that they know what they do not
know: and therefore those who are the lovers of wisdom are as yet neither
good nor bad. But the bad do not love wisdom any more than the good; for,
as we have already seen, neither is unlike the friend of unlike, nor like
Lysis |
