| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: Damnable! both sides rogue!
FIRST SOLDIER.
[Reads.]
'When he swears oaths, bid him drop gold, and take it:
After he scores, he never pays the score;
Half won is match well made; match, and well make it;
He ne'er pays after-debts, take it before;
And say a soldier, 'Dian,' told thee this:
Men are to mell with, boys are not to kiss;
For count of this, the count's a fool, I know it,
Who pays before, but not when he does owe it.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: most dear to him on earth. At a few steps distant from the vehicle he
now found a company of some thirty stragglers collected around an
immense fire, which they were feeding with planks, caisson covers,
wheels, and broken carriages. These soldiers were, no doubt, the last
comers of that crowd who, from the base of the hill of Studzianka to
the fatal river, formed an ocean of heads intermingled with fires and
huts,--a living sea, swayed by motions that were almost imperceptible,
and giving forth a murmuring sound that rose at times to frightful
outbursts. Driven by famine and despair, these poor wretches must have
rifled the carriage before de Sucy reached it. The old general and his
young wife, whom he had left lying in piles of clothes and wrapped in
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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 The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Their eyes are very close set, but do not protrude as do those
of the green men of Mars; their ears are high set, but more
laterally located than are the green men's, while their snouts
and teeth are much like those of our African gorilla. Upon
their heads grows an enormous shock of bristly hair.
It was into the eyes of such as these and the terrible plant
men that I gazed above the shoulder of my foe, and then, in
a mighty wave of snarling, snapping, screaming, purring rage,
they swept over me--and of all the sounds that assailed my
ears as I went down beneath them, to me the most hideous
was the horrid purring of the plant men.
The Gods of Mars |
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 In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: no, not in Israel.
I look forward to making great use of these Army Reserve men.
There are engineers amongst them; there are artillery men and infantry;
there are cavalry men, who know what a horse needs to keep him in good
health, and men of the transport department, for whom I shall find work
enough to do in the transference of the multitudinous waste of London
from our town Depots to the outlying Farm. This, however, is a
digression, by the way.
After having got the Farm into some kind of ship-shape, we should
select from the City Colonies all those who were likely to be
successful as our first settlers. These would consist of men who had
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
