| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: festally the room which had waited so many years for the
wandering nephew. The blinds were down.
Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the
first peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal
grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession
of a member of the family; and beyond the village in the
limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great
unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread-
giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black
patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I
had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: and Mrs. Thomas, though she was I retail trade,' was permitted to see
them and to `get ideas.' They were all generous, these travelling men;
they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs and gloves and ribbons
and striped stockings, and so many bottles of perfume and cakes
of scented soap that she bestowed some of them on Lena.
One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I came upon Lena and her funny,
square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the drugstore,
gazing in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's Arks arranged
in the frosty show window. The boy had come to town with a neighbour
to do his Christmas shopping, for he had money of his own this year.
He was only twelve, but that winter he had got the job of sweeping out
My Antonia |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: damage. The body of this particular coucou was painted yellow,
embellished along the top with a band of barber's blue, on which could
be read, on the sides, in silvery white letters, "Isle-Adam, Paris,"
and across the back, "Line to Isle-Adam."
Our descendants will be mightily mistaken if they fancy that thirteen
persons including Pierrotin were all that this vehicle could carry. On
great occasions it could take three more in a square compartment
covered with an awning, where the trunks, cases, and packages were
piled; but the prudent Pierrotin only allowed his regular customers to
sit there, and even they were not allowed to get in until at some
distance beyond the "barriere." The occupants of the "hen-roost" (the
|
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 Statesman by Plato: is to train, punishing with death and exterminating those who are violently
carried away to atheism and injustice, and enslaving those who are
wallowing in the mire of ignorance. The rest of the citizens she blends
into one, combining the stronger element of courage, which we may call the
warp, with the softer element of temperance, which we may imagine to be the
woof. These she binds together, first taking the eternal elements of the
honourable, the good, and the just, and fastening them with a divine cord
in a heaven-born nature, and then fastening the animal elements with a
human cord. The good legislator can implant by education the higher
principles; and where they exist there is no difficulty in inserting the
lesser human bonds, by which the State is held together; these are the laws
Statesman |
