| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: the mansion was to glide through its passages and public
chambers, late at night, to see that the servants had dropped no
fire from their flaring torches, nor left embers crackling and
blazing on the hearths. Perhaps it was this invariable custom of
walking her rounds in the hush of midnight that caused the
superstition of the times to invest the old woman with attributes
of awe and mystery; fabling that she had entered the portal of
the Province House, none knew whence, in the train of the first
Royal Governor, and that it was her fate to dwell there till the
last should have departed. But Sir William Howe, if he ever heard
this legend, had forgotten it.
 Twice Told Tales |
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 Hiero by Xenophon: amateurs." See "Mem." III. viii. 7.
[13] Or, "each time it is brought home to him that," etc.
Nor does the tyrant attain the object of his heart's desire more
quickly than do humbler mortals theirs. For consider, what are their
objects of ambition? The private citizen has set his heart, it may be,
on a house, a farm, a servant. The tyrant hankers after cities, or
wide territory, or harbours, or formidable citadels, things far more
troublesome and more perilous to achieve than are the pettier
ambitions of lesser men.
And hence it is, moreover, that you will find but few[14] private
persons paupers by comparison with the large number of tyrants who
|