| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: an expression of supreme and happy astonishment.
Stammato made Crioni a present of one of the state's
principal jewels--a huge carbuncle, which afterward
figured in the Ducal cap of state--and the pair parted.
Crioni went at once to the palace, denounced the criminal,
and handed over the carbuncle as evidence.
Stammato was arrested, tried, and condemned, with the
old-time Venetian promptness. He was hanged between
the two great columns in the Piazza--with a gilded rope,
out of compliment to his love of gold, perhaps. He got
no good of his booty at all--it was ALL recovered.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: The plates are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into
focus, after which the cap is removed and the exposure made.
I set my instrument for Ampersand Pond, sighted the picture through
the ground glass, and measured the focus. Then I waited for a
quiet moment, dropped the plate, moved it carefully forward to the
proper mark, and went around to take off the cap. I found that I
already had it in my hand, and the plate had been exposed for about
thirty seconds with a sliding focus!
I expostulated with myself. I said: "You are excited; you are
stupid; you are unworthy of the name of photographer. Light-
writer! You ought to write with a whitewash-brush!" The reproof
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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 The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: was always flinging himself at their heads, etc. His jokes about hats
and heads were irrepressible, though perhaps not dazzling.
Nevertheless, after August and October, 1830, he abandoned the hat
trade and the article Paris, and tore himself from things mechanical
and visible to mount into the higher spheres of Parisian speculation.
"He forsook," to use his own words, "matter for mind; manufactured
products for the infinitely purer elaborations of human intelligence."
This requires some explanation.
The general upset of 1830 brought to birth, as everybody knows, a
number of old ideas which clever speculators tried to pass off in new
bodies. After 1830 ideas became property. A writer, too wise to
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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 Statesman by Plato: parallel passages in his earlier writings; and we might a priori have
expected that, if altered, they would have been improved. But the
comparison of the Laws proves that this repetition of his own thoughts and
words in an inferior form is characteristic of Plato's later style.
3. The close connexion of them with the Theaetetus, Parmenides, and
Philebus, involves the fate of these dialogues, as well as of the two
suspected ones.
4. The suspicion of them seems mainly to rest on a presumption that in
Plato's writings we may expect to find an uniform type of doctrine and
opinion. But however we arrange the order, or narrow the circle of the
dialogues, we must admit that they exhibit a growth and progress in the
Statesman |
