| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: To break an oath, to win a paradise?
IV.
Sweet Cytherea, sitting by a brook
With young Adonis, lovely, fresh, and green,
Did court the lad with many a lovely look,
Such looks as none could look but beauty's queen,
She told him stories to delight his ear;
She show'd him favours to allure his eye;
To win his heart, she touch'd him here and there, --
Touches so soft still conquer chastity.
But whether unripe years did want conceit,
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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 Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: the mistress of a German inn (a costume which has been so often
depicted in colored prints that it is too common to describe here),--
well, this wife of the innkeeper kept the two friends alternately
patient and impatient with remarkable ability.
Little by little the noise decreased, the various travellers retired
to their rooms, the clouds of smoke dispersed. When places were set
for the two young men, and the classic carp of the Rhine appeared upon
the table, eleven o'clock was striking and the room was empty. The
silence of night enabled the young surgeons to hear vaguely the noise
their horses made in eating their provender, and the murmur of the
waters of the Rhine, together with those indefinable sounds which
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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 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: the way. Before telling my own mishaps, let me in two words relate
the lesson of my experience. If the pack is well strapped at the
ends, and hung at full length - not doubled, for your life - across
the pack-saddle, the traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly
not fit, such is the imperfection of our transitory life; it will
assuredly topple and tend to overset; but there are stones on every
roadside, and a man soon learns the art of correcting any tendency
to overbalance with a well-adjusted stone.
On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we
began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after, my hopes were in
the dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a
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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 The Koran: forth He will punish you with grievous woe, and will put in. your
stead a people other than you! ye cannot hurt Him at all, for God is
mighty over all!
Unless ye help him- and God did help him, when those who misbelieved
drove him forth the second of two. When they twain were in the cave;
when he said to his comrade, 'Grieve not, verily, God is with us;' and
God sent down His shechina upon him, and aided him with hosts ye could
not see, and made the word of those who misbelieved inferior, and
the word of God superior; for God is mighty and wise. March ye then,
light and heavy, and fight strenuously with your wealth and persons in
God's way; that is better for you if ye did but know!
The Koran |
