| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Betty Zane by Zane Grey: quietly, whispering low, until the brightening in the east betokened the break
of day, and then he was off, happy and lighthearted, to his labors.
A wedding was looked forward to with much pleasure by old and young.
Practically, it meant the only gathering of the settlers which was not
accompanied by the work of reaping the harvest, building a cabin, planning an
expedition to relieve some distant settlement, or a defense for themselves.
For all, it meant a rollicking good time; to the old people a feast, and the
looking on at the merriment of their children--to the young folk, a pleasing
break in the monotony of their busy lives, a day given up to fun and gossip, a
day of romance, a wedding, and best of all, a dance. Therefore Alice Reynold's
wedding proved a great event to the inhabitants of Fort Henry.
Betty Zane |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville by Sir John Mandeville: is to say, 'The virtue of things is in the midst'; and in that land
he would lead his life, and suffer passion and death of Jews, for
us, to buy and to deliver us from pains of hell, and from death
without end; the which was ordained for us, for the sin of our
forme-father Adam, and for our own sins also; for as for himself,
he had no evil deserved: for he thought never evil ne did evil:
and he that was king of glory and of joy, might best in that place
suffer death; because he chose in that land rather than in any
other, there to suffer his passion and his death. For he that will
publish anything to make it openly known, he will make it to be
cried and pronounced in the middle place of a town; so that the
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: right connexions.
At times the parallelism of so many cases
in so many distant ages continued to worry me as it had at first,
but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was
undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present.
Probably
all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long
and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in
my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory,
they had associated themselves with the creatures of their household
myths - the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men's minds
Shadow out of Time |
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 Gorgias by Plato: uncertain whether to live or die is better for them (Gor.): (13) the
treatment of freemen and citizens by physicians and of slaves by their
apprentices,--a somewhat laboured figure of speech intended to illustrate
the two different ways in which the laws speak to men (Laws). There also
occur in Plato continuous images; some of them extend over several pages,
appearing and reappearing at intervals: such as the bees stinging and
stingless (paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic, who are
generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which is
to the visible world what the idea of good is to the intellectual, in the
Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite animal, having the form of a
man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a many-headed monster
|
