| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine: and prepare his egg. It was surely worth while to be a
convalescent, given so sweet a comrade for a nurse; and after he
had moved over to the table he enjoyed immensely the gay firmness
with which she denied him what was not good for him.
"I'll bet y'u didn't have supper like this at Robbers' Roost." he
told her, enthusiastically.
"It wasn't so bad, considering everything." She was looking
directly at him as she spoke. "Your cousin is rather a remarkable
man in some ways. He manages to live on the best that can be got
in tin-can land."
"Did he tell y'u he was my cousin?" he asked, slowly.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: illusions, and alter the proportions of figures, in order to adapt their
works to the eye. And the Sophist also uses illusions, and his imitations
are apparent and not real. But how can anything be an appearance only?
Here arises a difficulty which has always beset the subject of appearances.
For the argument is asserting the existence of not-being. And this is what
the great Parmenides was all his life denying in prose and also in verse.
'You will never find,' he says, 'that not-being is.' And the words prove
themselves! Not-being cannot be attributed to any being; for how can any
being be wholly abstracted from being? Again, in every predication there
is an attribution of singular or plural. But number is the most real of
all things, and cannot be attributed to not-being. Therefore not-being
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: on hands and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors of the public
buildings, or private dwellings, that fills him with anguish for womanhood:
that somewhat quadrupedal posture is for him truly feminine, and does not
interfere with his ideal of the mother and child-bearer; and that, in some
other man's house, or perhaps his own, while he and the wife he keeps for
his pleasures are visiting concert or entertainment, some weary woman paces
till far into the night bearing with aching back and tired head the
fretful, teething child he brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty
or thirty pounds a year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by
work in an office should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have
a comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure,
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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 Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: and one within the freemasonry of the trade, he had a right to
claim.
This Lion or landlord,--for he was called both man and beast, by
reason of his having instructed the artist who painted his sign, to
convey into the features of the lordly brute whose effigy it bore,
as near a counterpart of his own face as his skill could compass
and devise,--was a gentleman almost as quick of apprehension, and
of almost as subtle a wit, as the mighty John himself. But the
difference between them lay in this: that whereas Mr Willet's
extreme sagacity and acuteness were the efforts of unassisted
nature, the Lion stood indebted, in no small amount, to beer; of
Barnaby Rudge |
