| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: Breaks from the voiceless tripod on our ears:
While as a ruined mother in some spasm
Bears a base child and loathes it, so our best enthusiasm
Genders unlawful children, Anarchy
Freedom's own Judas, the vile prodigal
Licence who steals the gold of Liberty
And yet has nothing, Ignorance the real
One Fraticide since Cain, Envy the asp
That stings itself to anguish, Avarice whose palsied grasp
Is in its extent stiffened, moneyed Greed
For whose dull appetite men waste away
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: mostly for Chita. She had ordered the girl under no
circumstances to approach the cabin.
Julien felt that blankets had been heaped upon him,---that some
gentle hand was bathing his scorching face with vinegar and
water. Vaguely also there came to him the idea that it was
night. He saw the shadow-shape of a woman moving against the red
light upon the wall;---he saw there was a lamp burning.
Then the delirium seized him: he moaned, sobbed, cried like a
child,---talked wildly at intervals in French, in English, in
Spanish.
---"Mentira!---you could not be her mother ... Still, if you
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: where venerable habits are abolished slowly. Though the lights were
not put out, the watchmen of each quarter stretched the chains across
the streets. Many doors were locked; the steps of a few belated
burghers, attended by their servants, armed to the teeth and bearing
lanterns, echoed in the distance. Soon the town, garroted as it were,
seemed to be asleep, and safe from robbers and evil-doers, except
through the roofs. In those days the roofs of houses were much
frequented after dark. The streets were so narrow in the provincial
towns, and even in Paris, that robbers could jump from the roofs on
one side to those on the other. This perilous occupation was long the
amusement of King Charles IX. in his youth, if we may believe 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 Poems by Oscar Wilde: But they are few, and all romance has flown,
And men can prophesy about the sun,
And lecture on his arrows - how, alone,
Through a waste void the soulless atoms run,
How from each tree its weeping nymph has fled,
And that no more 'mid English reeds a Naiad shows her head.
Methinks these new Actaeons boast too soon
That they have spied on beauty; what if we
Have analysed the rainbow, robbed the moon
Of her most ancient, chastest mystery,
Shall I, the last Endymion, lose all hope
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