| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: As from a furnace, vapours doth he send:
His eye, which scornfully glisters like fire,
Shows his hot courage and his high desire. 276
Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps,
With gentle majesty and modest pride;
Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps,
As who should say, 'Lo! thus my strength is tried;
And this I do to captivate the eye 281
Of the fair breeder that is standing by.'
What recketh he his rider's angry stir,
His flattering 'Holla', or his 'Stand, I say'? 284
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: which were shut up, and where they attempted to come out and were opposed.
Nor, indeed, could less be expected, for here were so many prisons
in the town as there were houses shut up; and as the people shut up or
imprisoned so were guilty of no crime, only shut up because
miserable, it was really the more intolerable to them.
It had also this difference, that every prison, as we may call it, had
but one jailer, and as he had the whole house to guard, and that many
houses were so situated as that they had several ways out, some more,
some less, and some into several streets, it was impossible for one
man so to guard all the passages as to prevent the escape of people
made desperate by the fright of their circumstances, by the resentment
A Journal of the Plague Year |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: the old place, and we're all dead but me."
"Your sister Dailey ain't gone, is she? Why, no, Louisa ain't
gone!" exclaimed Mrs. Todd, with surprise. "Why, I never heard of
that occurrence!"
"Yes'm; she passed away last October, in Lynn. She had made
her distant home in Vermont State, but she was making a visit to
her youngest daughter. Louisa was the only one of my family whose
funeral I wasn't able to attend, but 'twas a mere accident. All
the rest of us were settled right about home. I thought it was
very slack of 'em in Lynn not to fetch her to the old place; but
when I came to hear about it, I learned that they'd recently put up
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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 Alcibiades I by Plato: have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the
slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some
affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have
originated in a name or statement really occurring in some classical
author, are also of doubtful credit; while there is no instance of any
ancient writing proved to be a forgery, which combines excellence with
length. A really great and original writer would have no object in
fathering his works on Plato; and to the forger or imitator, the 'literary
hack' of Alexandria and Athens, the Gods did not grant originality or
genius. Further, in attempting to balance the evidence for and against a
Platonic dialogue, we must not forget that the form of the Platonic writing
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