| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: Happy again when it has left them rest.
Others shall say, "Grave Dica wrought her death.
She would not lift her lips to take a kiss,
Or ever lift her eyes to take a smile.
She was a pool the winter paves with ice
That the wild hunter in the hills must leave
With thirst unslaked in the brief southward sun."
RIVERS TO THE SEA
Ah Dica, it is not for thee I go;
And not for Phaon, tho' his ship lifts sail
Here in the windless harbor for the south.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: she won the day; for women have a
snare more than we men. I fell into
it--I was happy; but I awoke next
day in this iron cage. All through
the day I bellowed with rage in the
OR ROMAN REVENGE 225
darkness of this cellar, over which
is the Duchess' bedroom. At night
an ingenious counterpoise acting as
a lift raised me through the floor,
and I saw the Duchess in her lover's
The Muse of the Department |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: which begins the first of January.
Tamys Rivere twys, etc. The River Thames, frozen twice in one
year, so as men to walk on it, is a very signal accident, which
perhaps hath not fallen out for several hundred years before, and
is the reason why some astrologers have thought that this
prophecy could never be fulfilled, because they imagine such a
thing would never happen in our climate.
From Town of Stoffe, etc. This is a plain designation of the Duke
of Marlborough: One kind of stuff used to fatten land is called
marle, and every body knows that borough is a name for a town;
and this way of expression is after the usual dark manner of old
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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 Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: says, ``is like a doctor who, after a superficial diagnosis,
orders a draft for the patient, and names the day when he shall be
sent out of hospital, without regard to the state of his health at
the time.'' If he is cured before the date fixed, he must still
remain in the hospital; and he must go when the time is up, cured
or not.
Semal reached the same conclusion in his paper on ``conditional
liberation,'' at the second Congress of Criminal Anthropology.
And this notion of segregation for unfixed periods, put forward in
1867 for incorrigible criminals by the Swiss Prison Reform
Association, has already made great progress, especially in
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