| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: away all day till late, for he said he could not lunch at home.
My household work is done, so I shall take his foreign journal,
and lock myself up in my room and read it.
24 September.--I hadn't the heart to write last night,
that terrible record of Jonathan's upset me so. Poor dear!
How he must have suffered, whether it be true or only imagination.
I wonder if there is any truth in it at all. Did he get
his brain fever, and then write all those terrible things,
or had he some cause for it all? I suppose I shall never know,
for I dare not open the subject to him. And yet that man we
saw yesterday! He seemed quite certain of him, poor fellow!
Dracula |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: of place in designating a spinstress. The Clotho of antiquity is
the youngest of the three Fates; she holds the distaff whence our
destinies are spun, a distaff wound with plenty of rough flocks,
just a few shreds of silk and, very rarely, a thin strand of gold.
Prettily shaped and clad, as far as a Spider can be, the Clotho of
the naturalists is, above all, a highly talented spinstress; and
this is the reason why she is called after the distaff-bearing
deity of the infernal regions. It is a pity that the analogy
extends no further. The mythological Clotho, niggardly with her
silk and lavish with her coarse flocks, spins us a harsh existence;
the eight-legged Clotho uses naught but exquisite silk. She works
The Life of the Spider |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: with the beginning. You have not perhaps forgot a day when you were so
kind as to escort three very tedious misses to Hope Park? I have the
less cause to forget it myself, because you was so particular obliging
as to introduce me to some of the principles of the Latin grammar, a
thing which wrote itself profoundly on my gratitude."
"I fear I was sadly pedantical," said I, overcome with confusion at the
memory. "You are only to consider I am quite unused with the society
of ladies."
"I will say the less about the grammar then," she replied. "But how
came you to desert your charge? 'He has thrown her out, overboard, his
ain dear Annie!'" she hummed; "and his ain dear Annie and her two
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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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: problem of humanity is solved at last." But, ye long-suffering
powers of heaven, what a solution! It is beside the matter to call
the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of
course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture." No;
the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its
dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart,
want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are
not men and women, but ferrets--with here and there, of course, a
stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman
mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find
no more interest than in a pathological museum.
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