| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies,--
You are my deepening skies,
Give me your stars to hold.
APRIL
THE roofs are shining from the rain,
The sparrows twitter as they fly,
And with a windy April grace
The little clouds go by.
Yet the back-yards are bare and brown
With only one unchanging tree--
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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 Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: advance, but at the same time it would present its enemies
with enormous territory, which would overwhelm the
organizing powers which they have shown again and again
to be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks. Nor would
collapse of the present Government turn a bad harvest into a
good one. Such a collapse would mean the breakdown of
all existing organizations, and would intensify the horrors of
famine for every town dweller. Consequently, though the
desperation of hunger and resentment against inevitable
requisitions may breed riots and revolts here and there
throughout the country, the men who, in other
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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 Phaedrus by Plato: Secondly, there seems to be indicated a natural yearning of the human mind
that the great ideas of justice, temperance, wisdom, should be expressed in
some form of visible beauty, like the absolute purity and goodness which
Christian art has sought to realize in the person of the Madonna. But
although human nature has often attempted to represent outwardly what can
be only 'spiritually discerned,' men feel that in pictures and images,
whether painted or carved, or described in words only, we have not the
substance but the shadow of the truth which is in heaven. There is no
reason to suppose that in the fairest works of Greek art, Plato ever
conceived himself to behold an image, however faint, of ideal truths. 'Not
in that way was wisdom seen.'
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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 Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: among things that are the fittest to be forgotten.
From my Lord Castlemain's, house and the rest of the fine dwellings
on that side of the forest, for there are several very good houses
at Wanstead, only that they seem all swallowed up in the lustre of
his lordship's palace, I say, from thence, I went south, towards
the great road over that part of the forest called the Flats, where
we see a very beautiful but retired and rural seat of Mr.
Lethulier's, eldest son of the late Sir John Lethulier, of Lusum,
in Kent, of whose family I shall speak when I come on that side.
By this turn I came necessarily on to Stratford, where I set out.
And thus having finished my first circuit, I conclude my first
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