| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: wild. We forgot this in our hurry to arrive at man, and found by
experience, as the proverb says, that 'the more haste the worse speed.'
And now let us begin again at the art of managing herds. You have probably
heard of the fish-preserves in the Nile and in the ponds of the Great King,
and of the nurseries of geese and cranes in Thessaly. These suggest a new
division into the rearing or management of land-herds and of water-herds:--
I need not say with which the king is concerned. And land-herds may be
divided into walking and flying; and every idiot knows that the political
animal is a pedestrian. At this point we may take a longer or a shorter
road, and as we are already near the end, I see no harm in taking the
longer, which is the way of mesotomy, and accords with the principle which
Statesman |
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 Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: world spun topsy-turvy around him.
His way led along by the river, and on he went stumbling and
staggering. All of a sudden--plump! splash!--he was in the water
over head and ears. Up he came, spitting out the water and
shouting for help, splashing and sputtering, and kicking and
swimming, knowing no more where he was than the man in the moon.
Sometimes his head was under water and sometimes it was up again.
At last, just as his strength was failing him, his feet struck
the bottom, and he crawled up on the shore more dead than alive.
Then, through fear and cold and wet, he swooned away, and lay for
a long time for all the world as though he were dead.
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