| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: him clean of every mark of disaster. All night
he was alone with her in the still house,
his great head lying deep in the pillow.
In the pocket of his coat Winifred found the
letter that he had written her the night before
he left New York, water-soaked and illegible,
but because of its length, she knew it had
been meant for her.
For Alexander death was an easy creditor.
Fortune, which had smiled upon him
consistently all his life, did not desert him in
Alexander's Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: from the right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the
left wing, plus Clinton's division. To his English, to the regiments
of Halkett, to the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland,
he gave as reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick,
Nassau's contingent, Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's
Germans. This placed twenty-six battalions under his hand.
The right wing, as Charras says, was thrown back on the centre.
An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at the spot
where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo."
Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground,
Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong.
Les Miserables |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: not slow to impute imagination to art, we are by no means so ready
to appreciate its connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps,
to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that
demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not involve
the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite
compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side
we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the
humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first
so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed.
"This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches
bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually,
|
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 War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet
has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical
condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that
even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely
approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more
attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover
but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge
snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically
inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion,
which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-
day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate
War of the Worlds |
