| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that
your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy
and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought
to wide young eyes.
"For know you, that your gold and marble
city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved
in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western
windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and
the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys
in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily.
These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: is not to be taken seriously in all that he says, and Plato, both in the
Symposium and elsewhere, is not slow to admit a sort of Aristophanic
humour. How a great original genius like Plato might or might not have
written, what was his conception of humour, or what limits he would have
prescribed to himself, if any, in drawing the picture of the Silenus
Socrates, are problems which no critical instinct can determine.
On the other hand, the dialogue has several Platonic traits, whether
original or imitated may be uncertain. Socrates, when he departs from his
character of a 'know nothing' and delivers a speech, generally pretends
that what he is speaking is not his own composition. Thus in the Cratylus
he is run away with; in the Phaedrus he has heard somebody say something--
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