| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: to do so when I ceased to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I
had the very last of the very best of ALMA MATER; the same thing, I
hear (which makes it the more strange), had previously happened to
my father; and if they are good and do not die, something not at
all unsimilar will be found in time to have befallen my successors
of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of advantage in the
past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near
examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the most
lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of
the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes
|
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 Summer by Edith Wharton: spreading out before her a pale patch of dead grass and
coarse-leaved weeds enclosed in an immensity of
blackness.
Mr. Miles took Charity by the arm, and side by side
they walked behind the mattress. At length the old
woman with the lantern stopped, and Charity saw the
light fall on the stooping shoulders of the bearers and
on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were
bending. Mr. Miles released her arm and approached the
hollow on the other side of the ridge; and while the
men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the grave,
|
