| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: them to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.
And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the
successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of
the monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of
ordinary refined persons from politics; and the same result is coming
in England as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in
America. This is true also of popular religion: it is so horribly
irreligious that nobody with the smallest pretence to culture, or the
least inkling of what the great prophets vainly tried to make the
world understand, will have anything to do with it except for purely
secular reasons.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: Washed by the rains of the trade and clotting his hair in the mire;
And there, so mighty his hands, he bent the tree to his foot -
So keen the spur of his hunger, he plucked it naked of fruit.
There, as she pondered the clouds for the shadow of coming ills,
Ahupu, the woman of song, walked on high on the hills.
Of these was Rahero sprung, a man of a godly race;
And inherited cunning of spirit and beauty of body and face.
Of yore in his youth, as an aito, Rahero wandered the land,
Delighting maids with his tongue, smiting men with his hand.
Famous he was in his youth; but before the midst of his life
Paused, and fashioned a song of farewell to glory and strife.
Ballads |
