| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: This is all true--but I have not heard of any student
who DID decline; to decline and still remain in the corps
would make him unpleasantly conspicuous, and properly so,
since he knew, when he joined, that his main business,
as a member, would be to fight. No, there is no law
against declining--except the law of custom, which is
confessedly stronger than written law, everywhere.
The ten men whose duels I had witnessed did not go away
when their hurts were dressed, as I had supposed they would,
but came back, one after another, as soon as they were free
of the surgeon, and mingled with the assemblage in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Perchance there where he ploughs and makes his vintage;
With flames as manifold resplendent all
Was the eighth Bolgia, as I grew aware
As soon as I was where the depth appeared.
And such as he who with the bears avenged him
Beheld Elijah's chariot at departing,
What time the steeds to heaven erect uprose,
For with his eye he could not follow it
So as to see aught else than flame alone,
Even as a little cloud ascending upward,
Thus each along the gorge of the intrenchment
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: From this point of view I ask the reader's leave to begin this
notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with the accession of
his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.
This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
'Westward Ho!' was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been
long enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be
Kentish folk themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in
particular their connection is singularly involved. John and his
wife were each descended in the third degree from another Thomas
Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and brother to Accepted Frewen,
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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 Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: although this science contains indeed a number of correct and very
excellent precepts, there are, nevertheless, so many others, and these
either injurious or superfluous, mingled with the former, that it is
almost quite as difficult to effect a severance of the true from the false
as it is to extract a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble.
Then as to the analysis of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns,
besides that they embrace only matters highly abstract, and, to
appearance, of no use, the former is so exclusively restricted to the
consideration of figures, that it can exercise the understanding only on
condition of greatly fatiguing the imagination; and, in the latter, there
is so complete a subjection to certain rules and formulas, that there
Reason Discourse |
