| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: To haunt a man of forty-two,
Was no great compliment!"
"I'm not so young, Sir," he replied,
"As you might think. The fact is,
In caverns by the water-side,
And other places that I've tried,
I've had a lot of practice:
"But I have never taken yet
A strict domestic part,
And in my flurry I forget
The Five Good Rules of Etiquette
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and Mucedorus by William Shakespeare: Madan and their followers at an other.]
LOCRINE.
What, is the tiger started from his cave?
Is Gwendoline come from Cornubia,
That thus she braveth Locrine to the teeth?
And hast thou found thine armour, pretty boy,
Accompanied with these thy straggling mates?
Believe me, but this enterprise was bold,
And well deserveth commendation.
GWENDOLINE.
Aye, Locrine, traitorous Locrine! we are come,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: there were no tapu to enforce. He is therefore compelled to
maintain the present compromise of a partial tapu, applied, to
the best of his judgement, with a careful respect to persons and
to public opinion. And a very sensible English solution of the
difficulty, too, most readers will say. I should not dispute it
if dramatic poets really were what English public opinion
generally assumes them to be during their lifetime: that is, a
licentiously irregular group to be kept in order in a rough and
ready way by a magistrate who will stand no nonsense from them.
But I cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus,
Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen,
|
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 Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: the swimming-hole and knocking two big stones together. But I doubt
whether any country boy, engaged in this interesting scientific
experiment, has heard the conversation of his friends on the bank
who were engaged in hiding his clothes.
There are many curious and more or less venerable stories to the
effect that fishes may be trained to assemble at the ringing of a
bell or the beating of a drum. Lucian, a writer of the second
century, tells of a certain lake wherein many sacred fishes were
kept, of which the largest had names given to them, and came when
they were called. But Lucian was not a man of especially good
reputation, and there is an air of improbability about his statement
|
