| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of
thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than
all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have
been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys
stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you,
from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even
this wears off in time.
Moby Dick |
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 Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return
with pious and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the
infinite dismay with which he must have faced the tumbled vastness
where the gorge had once come out. But the rest of his story of
mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil death after
several years. Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that
had once made the gorge now bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave,
and the legend his poor, ill-told story set going developed into
the legend of a race of blind men somewhere "over there" one may
still hear to-day.
And amidst the little population of that now isolated and
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