| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: That it cried how true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supreme and stars of love;
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS.
Beauty, truth, and rarity.
Grace in all simplicity,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from King James Bible: EZE 23:2 Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother:
EZE 23:3 And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed
whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there
they bruised the teats of their virginity.
EZE 23:4 And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her
sister: and they were mine, and they bare sons and daughters. Thus were
their names; Samaria is Aholah, and Jerusalem Aholibah.
EZE 23:5 And Aholah played the harlot when she was mine; and she doted
on her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbours,
EZE 23:6 Which were clothed with blue, captains and rulers, all of them
desirable young men, horsemen riding upon horses.
King James Bible |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor
were four-and-twenty agonies.
On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them like
three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He
could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified
from men's observing eyes, he longed to be home, girt in by walls,
buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that
thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers
and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It
was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature,
lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should
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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 A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: persons, swept past with the rapidity of /Ombres Chinoises/. Not
knowing whether Roger would arrive in a carriage or on foot, the
needlewoman from the Rue du Tourniquet looked by turns at the foot-
passengers, and at the tilburies--light cabs introduced into Paris by
the English.
Expressions of refractoriness and of love passed by turns over her
youthful face when, after waiting for a quarter of an hour, neither
her keen eye nor her heart had announced the arrival of him whom she
knew to be due. What disdain, what indifference were shown in her
beautiful features for all the other creatures who were bustling like
ants below her feet. Her gray eyes, sparkling with fun, now positively
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