| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: them. Gladly I went in and out of the women's cabins and listened
to the argot of the men; my own ruling, administering, soldiering
little lot.
Cecily looked at them askance. To her the atmosphere was alien, and
I perceived that gently and privately she registered objections.
She cast a disapproving eye upon the wife of a Conservator of
Forests, who scanned with interest a distant funnel and laid a small
wager that it belonged to the Messageries Maritimes. She looked
with a straightened lip at the crisply stepping women who walked the
deck in short and rather shabby skirts with their hands in their
jacket-pockets talking transfers and promotions; and having got up
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: of frenzy by the near approach of a fearful danger. Her boy was
old enough to have walked by her side, and, in an indifferent
case, she would only have led him by the hand; but now the bare
thought of putting him out of her arms made her shudder, and she
strained him to her bosom with a convulsive grasp, as she went
rapidly forward.
The frosty ground creaked beneath her feet, and she trembled
at the sound; every quaking leaf and fluttering shadow sent the
blood backward to her heart, and quickened her footsteps.
She wondered within herself at the strength that seemed to be
come upon her; for she felt the weight of her boy as if it had
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: having brought you into the world, and nurtured and educated you, and given
you and every other citizen a share in every good which we had to give, we
further proclaim to any Athenian by the liberty which we allow him, that if
he does not like us when he has become of age and has seen the ways of the
city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his
goods with him. None of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him.
Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a
colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property.
But he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and
administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied
contract that he will do as we command him. And he who disobeys us is, as
|
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 Menexenus by Plato: Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three
days and more, is truly Platonic.
Such discourses, if we may form a judgment from the three which are extant
(for the so-called Funeral Oration of Demosthenes is a bad and spurious
imitation of Thucydides and Lysias), conformed to a regular type. They
began with Gods and ancestors, and the legendary history of Athens, to
which succeeded an almost equally fictitious account of later times. The
Persian war usually formed the centre of the narrative; in the age of
Isocrates and Demosthenes the Athenians were still living on the glories of
Marathon and Salamis. The Menexenus veils in panegyric the weak places of
Athenian history. The war of Athens and Boeotia is a war of liberation;
|
