| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: the subtlety and allusiveness of this species of composition; 2nd, the
difficulty of reproducing a state of life and literature which has passed
away. A satire is unmeaning unless we can place ourselves back among the
persons and thoughts of the age in which it was written. Had the treatise
of Antisthenes upon words, or the speculations of Cratylus, or some other
Heracleitean of the fourth century B.C., on the nature of language been
preserved to us; or if we had lived at the time, and been 'rich enough to
attend the fifty-drachma course of Prodicus,' we should have understood
Plato better, and many points which are now attributed to the extravagance
of Socrates' humour would have been found, like the allusions of
Aristophanes in the Clouds, to have gone home to the sophists and
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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 Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: of all--but I'll tell you what--' she added, as a sudden
thought struck her, `I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of
all. It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!'
But even this plan failed: the `thing' went through the
ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it.
`Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up
another pair of needles. `You'll make me giddy soon, if you go
on turning round like that.' She was now working with fourteen
pairs at once, and Alice couldn't help looking at her in great
astonishment.
`How CAN she knit with so many?' the puzzled child thought to
Through the Looking-Glass |
