| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: visit from Emilia. Do you think she had better go?"
"Mrs. Meredith?" asked Aunt Jane. "Is that woman alive yet?"
"Why, auntie!" said Kate. "We were talking about her only a
week ago."
"Perhaps so," conceded Aunt Jane, reluctantly. "But it seems
to me she has great length of days!"
"How very improperly you are talking, dear!" said Kate. "She
is not more than forty, and you are--"
"Fifty-four," interrupted the other.
"Then she has not seen nearly so many days as you."
"But they are such long days! That is what I must have meant.
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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 My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: national direction, delighting to outstrip "all creation."
Nor have the natural gifts, already named as his, lost anything
by his severe training. When unexcited, his mental processes are
probably slow, but singularly clear in perception, and wide in
vision, the unfailing memory bringing up all the facts in their
every aspect; incongruities he lays hold of incontinently, and
holds up on the edge of his keen and telling wit. But this wit
never descends to frivolity; it is rigidly in the keeping of his
truthful common sense, and always used in illustration or proof
of some point which could not so readily be reached any other
way. "Beware of a Yankee when he is feeding," is a shaft that
My Bondage and My Freedom |
