| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: wraiths of long-dead moons
Flit like blown feathers through the shades, borne
on the breath of sobbing tunes:
Say any tide of any time, of all the tides that ebb
and flow,
Shall buoy us on toward any clime; but say--at
last--you do not know!
LYRICS
"KING PANDION, HE IS DEAD"
"King Pandion, he is dead;
All thy friends are lapp'd in lead."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against
some lamplit blind. He watched them curiously. They moved
like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things.
He hated them. A dull rage was in his heart. As they turned
a corner, a woman yelled something at them from an open door,
and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards.
The driver beat at them with his whip.
It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.
Certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray
shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul
and sense, till he had found in them the full expression,
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: pawing of the good steeds, who, sensible of what was about to
happen, were impatient to dash into career. They stood thus for
perhaps three minutes, when, at a signal given by the Soldan, a
hundred instruments rent the air with their brazen clamours, and
each champion striking his horse with the spurs, and slacking the
rein, the horses started into full gallop, and the knights met in
mid space with a shock like a thunderbolt. The victory was not
in doubt--no, not one moment. Conrade, indeed, showed himself a
practised warrior; for he struck his antagonist knightly in the
midst of his shield, bearing his lance so straight and true that
it shivered into splinters from the steel spear-head up to 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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown, with
arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into
wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your
eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle
down farther off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ...
a whirling flower-drift of sleepy butterflies!
Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle:
primitively a wilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained,
diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar
chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed
its own;--the cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains,
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