| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: gathered. Their name is legion, and this is only one, of which the
interest is that it concerns even more closely several other
persons. Such episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas
that made up the innumerable facets of the big drama--which is yet
to be reported.
CHAPTER II
It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are
distinct--my own, as it were, and this other--they equally began,
in a manner, the first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram,
the night I came back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense
of life that, in London, for the very thrill of it, I could only
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: and stopped by the chess-board. Mrs. Flushing looked wilder than ever.
A great strand of black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks
were whipped a dark blood red, and drops of rain made wet marks
upon them.
Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof watching
the storm.
"It was a wonderful sight," he said. "The lightning went right
out over the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far away.
You can't think how wonderful the mountains looked too, with the lights
on them, and the great masses of shadow. It's all over now."
He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final struggle
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is
mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the
realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not
artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life
of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives
happily under the present system of government in Russia must
either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not
worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he
knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through
that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the
Christian ideal is a true thing.
|
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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: through the forum to the senate house. When he was set down at the
door, his sons and sons-in-law took him up in their arms, and,
walking close round about him, brought him into the senate. Out of
reverence for so worthy a man, the whole assembly was respectfully
silent.
And a little after raising up himself: "I bore," said he, "until
this time, the misfortune of my eyes with some impatience, but now
while I hear of these dishonorable motions and resolves of yours,
destructive to the glory of Rome, it is my affliction, that being
already blind, I am not deaf too. Where is now that discourse of
yours that became famous in all the world, that if he, the great
|
