| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: and it will have no anniversary.
I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the
setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood.
Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into
some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and
altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that
part of the land called Concord, unknown to me--to whom the sun
was servant--who had not gone into society in the village--who
had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground,
beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The
pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was
Walking |
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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: readers - that of the Gaskells, Fleeming was a frequent visitor.
To Mrs. Gaskell, he would often bring his new ideas, a process that
many of his later friends will understand and, in their own cases,
remember. With the girls, he had 'constant fierce wrangles,'
forcing them to reason out their thoughts and to explain their
prepossessions; and I hear from Miss Gaskell that they used to
wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his character into the
smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion to his
parents. Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most
characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite
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