| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: hands and were at peace. I had no longer the cruel task before
me, in endless perspective, aye, during the tedious for ever of
life, of labouring to overcome my repugnance--of labouring to
extinguish the hopes, the maybes of a lively imagination. Death
I had hailed as my only chance for deliverance; but, while existence
had still so many charms, and life promised happiness, I shrunk
from the icy arms of an unknown tyrant, though far more inviting
than those of the man, to whom I supposed myself bound without any
other alternative; and was content to linger a little longer,
waiting for I knew not what, rather than leave 'the warm precincts
of the cheerful day,' and all the unenjoyed affection of my nature.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: of little children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep
forever the shadow that first falls on them, and that is the mother's or at
best a woman's. There was never a great man who had not a great mother--it
is hardly an exaggeration. The first six years of our life make us; all
that is added later is veneer; and yet some say, if a woman can cook a
dinner or dress herself well she has culture enough.
"The mightiest and noblest of human work is given to us, and we do it ill.
Send a navvie to work into an artist's studio, and see what you will find
there! And yet, thank God, we have this work," she added, quickly--"it is
the one window through which we see into the great world of earnest labour.
The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: panting guide upon the ground to recover his breath, and point
out what was next to be done, Nectabanus was both frightened and
angry; but he had felt himself as completely in the power of the
robust knight as an owl in the claws of an eagle, and therefore
cared not to provoke him to any further display of his strength.
He made no complaints, therefore, of the usage he had received;
but, turning amongst the labyrinth of tents, he led the knight in
silence to the opposite side of the pavilion, which thus screened
them from the observation of the warders, who seemed either too
negligent or too sleepy to discharge their duty with much
accuracy. Arrived there, the dwarf raised the under part of the
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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 The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the
past.
Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception
of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some
one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and
Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human
imagination--it bored into the human brain like some grisly
The Last War: A World Set Free |
