| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Teaching the life he taught us, how
Would he be welcome to your tables?
I go and leave your logic-straws,
Your former-friends with face averted,
Your petty ways and narrow laws,
Your Grundy and your God, deserted.
From your frail ark of lies, I flee
I know not where, like Noah's raven.
Full to the broad, unsounded sea
I swim from your dishonest haven.
Alone on that unsounded deep,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: is fit to handle.
For two hours we skirted the edge of this melancholy checkerboard,
where salt has stifled all forms of vegetation, and where no one ever
comes but a few "paludiers," the local name given to the laborers of
the salt marshes. These men, or rather this clan of Bretons, wear a
special costume: a white jacket, something like that of brewers. They
marry among themselves. There is no instance of a girl of the tribe
having ever married any man who was not a paludier.
The horrible aspects of these marshes, these sloughs, the mud of which
was systematically raked, the dull gray earth that the Breton flora
held in horror, were in keeping with the gloom that filled our souls.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: of superb white silk. With a gentle, uniform movement, which might
be regulated by the wheels of a delicate piece of clockwork, the
tip of the abdomen rises and falls, each time touching the
supporting base a little farther away, until the extreme scope of
the mechanism is attained.
Then, without the Spider's moving her position, the oscillation is
resumed in the opposite direction. By means of this alternate
motion, interspersed with numerous contacts, a segment of the sheet
is obtained, of a very accurate texture. When this is done, the
Spider moves a little along a circular line and the loom works in
the same manner on another segment.
The Life of the Spider |
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 Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here
in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,--it
is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it
touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master's hand.
Sometimes,--to-night, for instance,--the curtain is accidentally
drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in
the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan,
woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter
looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its
unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a
terrible question. "Is this the End?" they say,--"nothing
Life in the Iron-Mills |
