| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas: redoubling his attentions to Madame to prevent your effacing
the impression he has made."
Monsieur made a movement of impatience, but as he noticed a
smile of triumph pass across the chevalier's lips, he drew
up his horse to a foot-pace. "Why," said he, "should I
occupy myself any longer about my cousin? Do I not already
know her? Were we not brought up together? Did I not see her
at the Louvre when she was quite a child?"
"A great change has taken place in her since then, prince.
At the period you allude to, she was somewhat less
brilliant, and scarcely so proud, either. One evening,
Ten Years Later |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: abiding horror -- a horror of the place I was in, and the bed I
lay in, and the plaids on the wall, and the voices, and the fire,
and myself.
The barber-gillie, who was a doctor too, was called in to
prescribe for me; but as he spoke in the Gaelic, I understood not
a word of his opinion, and was too sick even to ask for a
translation. I knew well enough I was ill, and that was all I
cared about.
I paid little heed while I lay in this poor pass. But Alan and
Cluny were most of the time at the cards, and I am clear that
Alan must have begun by winning; for I remember sitting up, and
Kidnapped |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: And the old word kinesis will be correctly given as iesis in corresponding
modern letters. Assuming this foreign root kiein, and allowing for the
change of the eta and the insertion of the nu, we have kinesis, which
should have been kieinsis or eisis; and stasis is the negative of ienai (or
eisis), and has been improved into stasis. Now the letter rho, as I was
saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the
expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose:
for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho;
also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words
such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein
(break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of
|
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 Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: Yell'd and shriek'd between her daughters in her fierce volubility.
Till her people all around the royal chariot agitated,
Madly dash'd the darts together, writhing barbarous lineaments,
Made the noise of frosty woodlands, when they shiver in January,
Roar'd as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices,
Yell'd as when the winds of winter tear an oak on a promontory.
So the silent colony hearing her tumultuous adversaries
Clash the darts and on the buckler beat with rapid unanimous hand,
Thought on all her evil tyrannies, all her pitiless avarice,
Till she felt the heart within her fall and flutter tremulously,
Then her pulses at the clamoring of her enemy fainted away.
|
