| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next
morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner.
It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin
ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.
Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity.
On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us,
and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory
which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was
at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into
the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords
of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men
 Frankenstein |