| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: --just sleeping. It's a wonderful world."
CHAPTER XV
PROMINENT PEOPLE
The state apartments of the Wind Vane Keeper
would have seemed astonishingly intricate to Graham
had he entered them fresh from his nineteenth century
life, but already he was growing accustomed to the scale
of the new time. They can scarcely be described as
halls and rooms, seeing that a complicated system of
arches, bridges, passages and galleries divided and
united every part of the great space. He came out
When the Sleeper Wakes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: Such is the service of a fine art and of ships that sail the sea.
And therein I think I can lay my finger upon the difference between
the seamen of yesterday, who are still with us, and the seamen of
to-morrow, already entered upon the possession of their
inheritance. History repeats itself, but the special call of an
art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly
gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Nothing will awaken the same response of pleasurable emotion or
conscientious endeavour. And the sailing of any vessel afloat is
an art whose fine form seems already receding from us on its way to
the overshadowed Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a modern
The Mirror of the Sea |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: to go."
"But you will tell me, old wretch?"
"Yes, yes. Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a
little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be
depraved."
"Do not forget the police-court," said Lisbeth, who flattered herself
that she would some day see Hulot there.
"No.--It is in the Rue de Charonne," said the Baron, "a part of the
town where no fuss is made about anything. No one will ever find me
there. I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a
retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my
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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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to
fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet's
Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name--
Things standing thus unknown--I leave behind!
but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice,
and enshrined her among the saints. He has lifted the Chicago
anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the
Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has
done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he
tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean,
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