| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: Margret left her, turning into the crowded street leading to the
part of the town where the factories lay. The throng of
anxious-faced men and women jostled and pushed, but she passed
through them with a different heart from yesterday's. Somehow,
the morbid fancies were gone: she was keenly alive; the coarse
real life of this huckster fired her, touched her blood with a
more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader. As she went down
the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's little
cracked bell far off: it sounded like a Christmas song to her.
She half smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered
brain the world had seemed a gray, dismal Dance of Death. How
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
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 The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: those of other domiciles, the characteristics of the old Flemish
buildings, so naively adapted to the patriarchal manners and customs
of that excellent land. Before describing this house it may be well,
in the interest of other writers, to explain the necessity for such
didactic preliminaries,--since they have roused a protest from certain
ignorant and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing
the generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without
gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?
The events of human existence, whether public or private, are so
closely allied to architecture that the majority of observers can
reconstruct nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of life,
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