| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: touch of Socratic irony, (8) which admits of a wide application and reveals
a deep insight into the world:--that in speaking of holy things and persons
there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you
should speak the truth about them--this is the sort of praise which
Socrates is unable to give. Lastly, (9) we may remark that the banquet is
a real banquet after all, at which love is the theme of discourse, and huge
quantities of wine are drunk.
The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself,
true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name,
is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who
compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the
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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 The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: prevalent winds. In the middle of the continent there is a
broad intermediate band, including central Chile and the
provinces of La Plata, where the rain-bringing winds have
not to pass over lofty mountains, and where the land is neither
a desert nor covered by forests. But even the rule, if
confined to South America, of trees flourishing only in a
climate rendered humid by rain-bearing winds, has a strongly
marked exception in the case of the Falkland Islands. These
islands, situated in the same latitude with Tierra del Fuego
and only between two and three hundred miles distant from
it, having a nearly similar climate, with a geological
The Voyage of the Beagle |
