| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: did not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another
kind of life. But Lowick is my chosen home."
The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him
to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her:
it was clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were
both silent for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an
air of saying at last what had been in her mind beforehand.
"I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice
that you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate
Middlemarch |
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 Meno by Plato: are put forth, not for their own sake, or as an exposition of Plato's
theory of ideas, but with a view of showing that poetry and the mimetic
arts are concerned with an inferior part of the soul and a lower kind of
knowledge. On the other hand, in the 6th and 7th books of the Republic we
reach the highest and most perfect conception, which Plato is able to
attain, of the nature of knowledge. The ideas are now finally seen to be
one as well as many, causes as well as ideas, and to have a unity which is
the idea of good and the cause of all the rest. They seem, however, to
have lost their first aspect of universals under which individuals are
contained, and to have been converted into forms of another kind, which are
inconsistently regarded from the one side as images or ideals of justice,
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