| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: Fairholme, to Josephs, and in particular to Miss Wilson, who, he
said, had known him from his earliest childhood. Fairholme, glad
of an opportunity to show that he was no mealy mouthed parson,
declared, when applied to, that Smilash was the greatest rogue in
the country. Josephs, partly from benevolence, and partly from a
vague fear that Smilash might at any moment take an action
against him for defamation of character, said he had no doubt
that he was a very cheap workman, and that it would be a charity
to give him some little job to encourage him. Miss Wilson
confirmed Fairholme's account; and the church organist, who had
tuned all the pianofortes in the neighborhood once a year for
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: are mysteries more than we shall ever fathom.
The zoophytes and microscopic animalcules which people every shore
and every drop of water, have been now raised to a rank in the
human mind more important, perhaps, than even those gigantic
monsters whose models fill the lake at the Crystal Palace. The
research which has been bestowed, for the last century, upon these
once unnoticed atomies has well repaid itself; for from no branch
of physical science has more been learnt of the SCIENTIA
SCIENTIARUM, the priceless art of learning; no branch of science
has more utterly confounded a wisdom of the wise, shattered to
pieces systems and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary names,
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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 Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of
age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
dupes of social laws.
The marquis is a rather insignificant man. He stands well at court;
his good qualities are as negative as his defects; the former can no
more make him a reputation for virtue than the latter can give him the
sort of glamor cast by vice. As deputy, he never speaks, but he votes
RIGHT. He behaves in his own home as he does in the Chamber.
Consequently, he is held to be one of the best husbands in France.
Though not susceptible of lively interest, he never scolds, unless, to
be sure, he is kept waiting. His friends have named him "dull
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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 The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses
when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to
stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and, as they left,
had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.
There
were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills
piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of
Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the
heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had
smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that
had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But
The Dunwich Horror |
