| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: at most two hundred years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had
ceased to flower or blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning
with the Alexandrian writers and even before them in the platitudes of
Isocrates and his school, spreads over much more than a thousand years.
And from this decline the Greek language and literature, unlike the Latin,
which has come to life in new forms and been developed into the great
European languages, never recovered.
This monotony of literature, without merit, without genius and without
character, is a phenomenon which deserves more attention than it has
hitherto received; it is a phenomenon unique in the literary history of the
world. How could there have been so much cultivation, so much diligence in
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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 Crito by Plato: here to-day, as persons who have come from Sunium tell me that they have
left her there; and therefore to-morrow, Socrates, will be the last day of
your life.
SOCRATES: Very well, Crito; if such is the will of God, I am willing; but
my belief is that there will be a delay of a day.
CRITO: Why do you think so?
SOCRATES: I will tell you. I am to die on the day after the arrival of
the ship?
CRITO: Yes; that is what the authorities say.
SOCRATES: But I do not think that the ship will be here until to-morrow;
this I infer from a vision which I had last night, or rather only just now,
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