| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: many men's thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I
have heard said) the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new
Regime--a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold
water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. That would be
to confess man--what I shall never confess him to be--the creature
of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of
spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that
bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the first place,
the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true swarm of
honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as
Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: Who laboured with great industry
To make it fair and true.
Accept a ribbon red, I beg,
For Madam Purrer's tail,
And ice cream made by lovely Peg,
A Mont Blanc in a pail.
Their dearest love my makers laid
Within my breast of snow.
Accept it, and the Alpine maid,
From Laurie and from Jo.
How Beth laughed when she saw it, how Laurie ran up and
Little Women |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: houses and stop there. The same to those belonging to Tuamasanga.
If you obey this instruction, then you will all be forgiven; if you
do not obey, then all your villages will be burnt like Manono.
These instructions are made in truth in the sight of God in the
Heaven." The same morning, accordingly, the ADLER steamed out of
the bay with a force of Tamasese warriors and some native boats in
tow, the Samoan fleet in question. Manono was shelled; the
Tamasese warriors, under the conduct of a Manono traitor, who paid
before many days the forfeit of his blood, landed and did some
damage, but were driven away by the sight of a force returning from
the mainland; no one was hurt, for the women and children, who
|
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 Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: horribly jealous!
Felipe's eyes were too often on you. You used to have little talks
together at the foot of your rock, which were a torture to me; and I
was fast becoming irritable and unlike myself. Your truly Spanish
beauty could not fail to recall to him his native land, and along with
it Marie Heredia, and I can be jealous of the past too. Your
magnificent black hair, your lovely dark eyes, your brow, where the
peaceful joy of motherhood stands out radiant against the shadows
which tell of past suffering, the freshness of your southern skin, far
fairer than that of a blonde like me, the splendid lines of your
figure, the breasts, on which my godson hangs, peeping through the
|
