| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: stolen goods; which all the parish says he must do by conversing
with the devil and other evil spirits: And no wise man will ever
allow he could converse personally with either, till after he was
dead.
Thirdly, I will plainly prove him to be dead out of his own
almanack for this year, and from the very passage which he
produces to make us think him alive. He there says, "He is not
only now alive, but was also alive on the very 29th of March,
which I foretold he should die on": By this, he declares his
opinion, that a man may be alive now, who was not alive a
twelvemonth ago. And indeed, there lies the sophistry of this
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Open Letter on Translating by Dr. Martin Luther: published under an other's name! What type of virtue is this that
slanders and heaps shame on someone else's work, and then steals
it, and publishes it under one's own name, thereby seeking glory
and esteem through the slandered work of someone else! I leave
that for his judge to say. I am glad and satisfied that my work
(as St. Paul also boasts ) is furthered by my enemies, and that
Luther's work, without Luther's name but that of his enemy, is to
be read. What better vengeance?!
Returning to the issue at hand, if your Papist wishes to make a
great fuss about the word "alone" (sola), say this to him: "Dr.
Martin Luther will have it so and he says that a papist and an ass
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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 Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.
This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned
out a quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black,
short beard, a fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He
was as jovial and good-natured as any boy could desire. I was
still asleep in my room in a modest hotel near the quays of the
old port, after the fatigues of the journey via Vienna, Zurich,
Lyons, when he burst in flinging the shutters open to the sun of
Provence and chiding me boisterously for lying abed. How
pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to be up and
off instantly for a "three years' campaign in the South Seas." O
Some Reminiscences |
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 Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he
has found and struck them. He cannot recognise that this
phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and
delicate and alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and
amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of
the winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and
flourish. A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen
snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for the hale
rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window-
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