| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806,
form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry
did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement
proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn
stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed
to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones,
found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like
rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots
were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many
ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a
theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.
The Dunwich Horror |
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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be
outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the
language of passion: their cruelty shews it. There is no evidence
that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his
revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing
neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that
she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.
In seizing on these two points Mr Harris has made so sure a stroke,
and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me to
do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I
think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespear's social
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