| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: they had finished their story, gave them a pipe to smoke. He then
called up all hands, stationed sentinels in different quarters,
but told them to keep as vigilant an eye within the camp as
without.
The warriors were evidently baffled by these precautions, and,
having smoked their pipe, and vapored off their valor, took their
departure. The farce, however, did not end here. After a little
while the warriors returned, ushering in another savage, still
more heroically arrayed. This they announced as the chief of the
belligerent village, but as a great pacificator. His people had
been furiously bent upon the attack, and would have doubtless
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Is like the watcher by a sick man's bed
Who talks of sleep but gives it not; his rod
Hath lost its virtue, and, when all is said,
Death is too rude, too obvious a key
To solve one single secret in a life's philosophy.
And Love! that noble madness, whose august
And inextinguishable might can slay
The soul with honeyed drugs, - alas! I must
From such sweet ruin play the runaway,
Although too constant memory never can
Forget the arched splendour of those brows Olympian
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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 A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: Presles to take down their pretensions. Moreover, the perquisites
granted by Monsieur de Serizy allowed them to live in the midst of
that abundance which is the luxury of country life. Milk, eggs,
poultry, game, fruits, flowers, forage, vegetables, wood, the steward
and his wife used in profusion, buying absolutely nothing but
butcher's-meat, wines, and the colonial supplies required by their
life of luxury. The poultry-maid baked their bread; and of late years
Moreau had paid his butcher with pigs from the farm, after reserving
those he needed for his own use.
On one occasion, the countess, always kind and good to her former
maid, gave her, as a souvenir perhaps, a little travelling-carriage,
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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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: walking up and down, he hummed it, dropped it, fell silent.
He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his
pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises
one's eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a
cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the
printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without
his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified
him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly
clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his
splendid mind.
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano,
To the Lighthouse |
