| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: of her studies.
It was a book of Domestic Cookery, open at the article Bread Sauce.'
I returned the book, looking, I suppose, a little blank, as the lady
laughed merrily at my discomfiture. "It's far more exciting than some
of the modern ghosts, I assure you! Now there was a Ghost last
month--I don't mean a real Ghost in in Supernature--but in a
Magazine. It was a perfectly flavourless Ghost. It wouldn't have
frightened a mouse! It wasn't a Ghost that one would even offer a chair
to!"
"Three score years and ten, baldness, and spectacles, have their
advantages after all!", I said to myself. "Instead of a bashful youth
Sylvie and Bruno |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: and Plumflower, which delighted her baby-eyes when her mother first showed
her the mirror. She longed for some chance to steal the mirror, and hide
it,-- that she might thereafter treasure it always. But the chance did not
come; and she became very unhappy,-- felt as if she had foolishly given
away a part of her life. She thought about the old saying that a mirror is
the Soul of a Woman -- (a saying mystically expressed, by the Chinese
character for Soul, upon the backs of many bronze mirrors),-- and she
feared that it was true in weirder ways than she had before imagined. But
she could not dare to speak of her pain to anybody.
Now, when all the mirrors contributed for the Mugenyama bell had been sent
to the foundry, the bell-founders discovered that there was one mirror
Kwaidan |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: The pleasant future still
Shall smile to me,
And hope with wooing hands
Wave on to fairy lands
All over dale and hill
And earth and sea.
And you who doubt the sky
And fear the sun -
You - Christian with the pack -
You shall not wander back
For I am Hopeful - I
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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 The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs: The murder that rose again and again in his untaught
heart he forced back by thoughts of the sweet, pure
face of the girl whose image he had set up in the inner
temple of his being, as a gentle, guiding divinity.
"He made me without a soul," he repeated over and over
again to himself, "but I have found a soul--she shall
be my soul. Von Horn could not explain to me what a
soul is. He does not know. None of them knows. I am
wiser than all the rest, for I have learned what a soul is.
Eyes cannot see it--fingers cannot feel it, but he who possess
it knows that it is there for it fills his whole breast
The Monster Men |
