| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: got far. Standing for a while apart from the woeful fight, he
changed his armour. His own he sent to the strong city of Ilius
and to the Trojans, while he put on the immortal armour of the
son of Peleus, which the gods had given to Peleus, who in his age
gave it to his son; but the son did not grow old in his father's
armour.
When Jove, lord of the storm-cloud, saw Hector standing aloof and
arming himself in the armour of the son of Peleus, he wagged his
head and muttered to himself saying, "A! poor wretch, you arm in
the armour of a hero, before whom many another trembles, and you
reck nothing of the doom that is already close upon you. You have
The Iliad |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: skeleton lying on its side.
They all looked closely at it, and the mother said: "That must be
Sam." Then she shouted: "Hi! Gaspard!" A cry from the interior of
the house answered her, so sharp a cry that one might have
thought some animal uttered it. Old Hauser repeated: "Hi!
Gaspard!" and they heard another cry, similar to the first.
Then the three men, the father and the two sons, tried to open
the door, but it resisted their efforts. From the empty cow-stall
they took a beam to serve as a battering-ram, and hurled it
against the door with all their might. The wood gave way, and the
boards flew into splinters; then the house was shaken by a loud
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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 Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: take a tabouret at Court. So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the
age of eighteen, came out of the profound solitude in which her
girlhood had been spent to marry the Duc de Langeais's eldest
son. The two families at that time were living quite out of the
world; but after the invasion of France, the return of the
Bourbons seemed to every Royalist mind the only possible way of
putting an end to the miseries of the war.
The Ducs de Navarreins and de Langeais had been faithful
throughout to the exiled Princes, nobly resisting all the
temptations of glory under the Empire. Under the circumstances
they naturally followed out the old family policy; and Mlle
|
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 Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: has a higher position than is usually claimed for him in the
progress of the Greek intellect.
And, indeed, it seems that not merely the importance of Plutarch
himself but also that of the land of his birth in the evolution of
Greek civilisation has been passed over by modern critics. To us,
indeed, the bare rock to which the Parthenon serves as a crown, and
which lies between Colonus and Attica's violet hills, will always
be the holiest spot in the land of Greece: and Delphi will come
next, and then the meadows of Eurotas where that noble people lived
who represented in Hellenic thought the reaction of the law of duty
against the law of beauty, the opposition of conduct to culture.
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