| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: or something. So awful was the idea of putting my hands out, that
I half thought I would refuse.
Well, none of us are a penny the worse, Lloyd's cold better; I,
with a twinge of the rheumatic; and Fanny better than her ordinary.
General conclusion between Lloyd and me as to the journey: A
prolonged visit to the dentist's, complicated with the fear of
death.
Never, O never, do you get me there again. - Ever affectionate son,
R. L. S.
Letter: TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
[CHALET AM STEIN, DAVOS-PLATZ, FEBRUARY 1882.]
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her
daughter.
- No, poor, dear woman, - that could not have been. But I am
dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile
on my face all the time.
The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out
of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of
oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific
cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as
that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump
and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
