| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR
The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important
personage than now. The supply of learned men was very small, the
demand for them very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and
a great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more
and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that
of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan
Art an element which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet
necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the
Beautiful. At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural
that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: Of their accustomed meeting,
And sad and sick at heart was she,
Her heart all wildly beating.
In chill suspense the hours went by,
The wild storm burst above her:
She turned her to the river nigh,
And shouted, "Over, over!"
A dim, discoloured, doubtful light
The moon's dark veil permitted,
And thick before her troubled sight
Fantastic shadows flitted.
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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 Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: way these visions mixed up with my dream of in my uncle in his
despair. The black body which saw now damaged and partly buried,
but which, nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely
alive and perceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash under my
uncle's face. I tried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my
mind, but it prevailed over all my efforts.
The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly
creature's body. I am the least superstitious of men, but it
drew me. It drew me back into those thickets to the very place
where I had hidden him.
Some evil and detestable beast had been at him, and he lay
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: stillness. He listened as if there had been something to hear, but
this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication. "If you
won't then - good: I spare you and I give up. You affect me as by
the appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons
rigid and sublime - what do I know? - we both of us should have
suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged
as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce
- never, on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever - and let
ME!"
That, for Brydon, was the deep sense of this last demonstration -
solemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to be. He brought it to
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