| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus
explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in
this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact
what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the
tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more.
Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we
traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually
find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time
country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like
ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet
and big in the small one. Still stranger things may exist around
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: satisfied. "This is really too bad. You never will do him any
justice."
"Ah?" said Aunt Jane, chilling again, "I thought I did. I
observe he is very much afraid of me, and there seems to be no
other reason."
"The real trouble is," said Harry, after a pause, "that you
doubt his constancy."
"What do you call constancy?" said she. "Kissing a woman's
picture ten years after a man has broken her heart? Philip
Malbone has that kind of constancy, and so had his father
before him."
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: is, as they were none of Alan's; and gave Balachulish as the
place I was travelling to, to meet a friend; for I thought
Aucharn, or even Duror, would be too particular, and might put
him on the scent.
On his part, he told me much of his work and the people he worked
among, the hiding priests and Jacobites, the Disarming Act, the
dress, and many other curiosities of the time and place. He
seemed moderate; blaming Parliament in several points, and
especially because they had framed the Act more severely against
those who wore the dress than against those who carried weapons.
This moderation put it in my mind to question him of the Red Fox
Kidnapped |
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 Poems of William Blake by William Blake: Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies,
How great thy use, how great thy blessing, every thing that lives.
Lives not alone nor or itself: fear not and I will call,
The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice.
Come forth worm and the silent valley, to thy pensive queen.
The helpless worm arose and sat upon the Lillys leaf,
And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale.
III.
Then Thel astonish'd view'd the Worm upon its dewy bed.
Art thou a Worm? image of weakness. art thou but a Worm?
I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lillys leaf;
Poems of William Blake |
