| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the
infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a
boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow,
seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour,
reminds you almost painfully of other places, and brings into your
head the delights of more Arcadian days - the path across the meadow,
the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the
colours, and the whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare
as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel,
you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour
of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: phantoms and visions night and day,--to be a remedy for this, God combined
with it the liver, and placed it in the house of the lower nature,
contriving that it should be solid and smooth, and bright and sweet, and
should also have a bitter quality, in order that the power of thought,
which proceeds from the mind, might be reflected as in a mirror which
receives likenesses of objects and gives back images of them to the sight;
and so might strike terror into the desires, when, making use of the bitter
part of the liver, to which it is akin, it comes threatening and invading,
and diffusing this bitter element swiftly through the whole liver produces
colours like bile, and contracting every part makes it wrinkled and rough;
and twisting out of its right place and contorting the lobe and closing and
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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 Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: have it. It was not your tulip you cared for. There was in
that false bulb some witchcraft, perhaps some means of
correspondence with conspirators against his Highness who
has granted you your life. I always said they were wrong in
not cutting your head off."
"Father, father!" cried Rosa.
"Yes, yes! it is better as it is now," repeated Gryphus,
growing warm; "I have destroyed it, and I'll do the same
again, as often as you repeat the trick. Didn't I tell you,
my fine fellow, that I would make your life a hard one?"
"A curse on you!" Cornelius exclaimed, quite beyond himself
The Black Tulip |
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 Men of Iron by Howard Pyle: then as it is now for the mother to see the nestling thrust from
the nest to shift for itself. What tears were shed, what words of
love were spoken to the only man-child, none but the mother and
the son ever knew.
The next morning Myles and the old bowman rode away, and no doubt
to the boy himself the dark shadows of leave-taking were lost in
the golden light of hope as he rode out into the great world to
seek his fortune.
CHAPTER 3
WHAT MYLES remembered of Falworth loomed great and grand and big,
as things do in the memory of childhood, but even memory could
Men of Iron |
