| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the
East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like
the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of
knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of
the race, which pales before the light of common day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild
strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature,
reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood, her
wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature,
Walking |
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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: having grasped the fact, gave the advice of an old traveller that they
should take nice canned vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder.
She leant over to Mrs. Flushing and whispered something which
from the twinkle in her eyes probably had reference to bugs.
Then Helen was reciting "Toll for the Brave" to St. John Hirst,
in order apparently to win a sixpence which lay upon the table;
while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his section
of the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon
and the undergraduate's bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to
remember the name of a man who might have been another Garibaldi,
and had written a book which they ought to read; and Mr. Thornbury
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