| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Aesop's Fables by Aesop: scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
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AESOP'S FABLES (82 Fables)
Aesop's Fables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: compassion of a woman all that is mortifying in human pity, "ought we
not to feel ashamed of our happiness in presence of such misery?"
"Nothing is so cruelly painful as to have powerless desires," I
answered. "Those two poor creatures, the father and son, will never
know how keen our sympathy for them is, any more than the world will
know how beautiful are their lives; they are laying up their treasures
in heaven."
"Oh, how poor this country is!" she said, pointing to a field enclosed
by a dry stone wall, which was covered with droppings of cow's dung
applied symmetrically. "I asked a peasant-woman who was busy sticking
them on, why it was done; she answered that she was making fuel. Could
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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 Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: some far away across the sea, and, perhaps, even now sitting around
the forest camp-fire in Maine or Canada, and some with whom we
shall keep company no more until we cross the greater ocean into
that happy country whither they have preceded us.
V.
Instead of going straight down the valley by the high road, a drive
of an hour, to the railway in the Pusterthal, I walked up over the
mountains to the east, across the Platzwiesen, and so down through
the Pragserthal. In one arm of the deep fir-clad vale are the
Baths of Alt-Prags, famous for having cured the Countess of Gorz of
a violent rheumatism in the fifteenth century. It is an antiquated
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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 Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: escape.
But, ladies, there is an old and true proverb, that you may bring
a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink. And in like
wise it is too true, that you may bring people to the fresh air,
but you cannot make them breath it. Their own folly, or the folly
of their parents and educators, prevents their lungs being duly
filled and duly emptied. Therefore the blood is not duly
oxygenated, and the whole system goes wrong. Paleness, weakness,
consumption, scrofula, and too many other ailments, are the
consequences of ill-filled lungs. For without well-filled lungs,
robust health is impossible.
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