| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: he turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. Born in
1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still a
famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita--the hermit.
Erasmus, in a letter still extant, but suspected not to be genuine,
addressed him by that name.
How he passed the first thirty-three years of his life it is hard to
say. He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, been in
Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with
barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges
of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of
that day had in the Tyrol.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: must pass the forest. We shall make that passage dearer, pardy,
than any battle. Then, when he hath got to earth with such ragged
handful as escapeth us - all his great friends fallen and fled
away, and none to give him aid - we shall beleaguer that old fox
about, and great shall be the fall of him. 'Tis a fat buck; he
will make a dinner for us all."
"Ay," returned Lawless, "I have eaten many of these dinners
beforehand; but the cooking of them is hot work, good Master Ellis.
And meanwhile what do we? We make black arrows, we write rhymes,
and we drink fair cold water, that discomfortable drink."
"Y' are untrue, Will Lawless. Ye still smell of the Grey Friars'
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Regime--a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold
water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. That would be
to confess man--what I shall never confess him to be--the creature
of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of
spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that
bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the first place,
the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true swarm of
honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as
Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each
sprang from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of
its own: it was fostered by the carcass it fed on during
|
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 From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: prodigious great. How they came thither, or from whence (no stones
of that kind being now to be found in that part of England near it)
is still the mystery, for they are of such immense bulk that no
engines or carriages which we have in use in this age could stir
them.
Doubtless they had some method in former days in foreign countries,
as well as here, to move heavier weights than we find practicable
now. How else did Solomon's workmen build the battlement or
additional wall to support the precipice of Mount Moriah, on which
the Temple was built, which was all built of stones of Parian
marble, each stone being forty cubits long and fourteen cubits
|
