| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Ham. Sir I lacke Aduancement
Rosin. How can that be, when you haue the voyce of
the King himselfe, for your Succession in Denmarke?
Ham. I, but while the grasse growes, the Prouerbe is
something musty.
Enter one with a Recorder.
O the Recorder. Let me see, to withdraw with you, why
do you go about to recouer the winde of mee, as if you
would driue me into a toyle?
Guild. O my Lord, if my Dutie be too bold, my loue
is too vnmannerly
Hamlet |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mayflower Compact: in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and
combine ourselves together into a civill Body Politick,
for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance
of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact,
constitute, and frame, such just and equall Laws, Ordinances,
Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time,
as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the
Generall Good of the Colonie; unto which we promise
all due Submission and Obedience.
In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names
at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the Raigne of our
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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 The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: vineyards. In short, he led the true Tourangian life,--the life of a
little country-townsman. He was, moreover, an important member of the
bourgeoisie,--a leader among the small proprietors, all of them
envious, jealous, delighted to catch up and retail gossip and
calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging things down to their own
level; and at war with all kinds of superiority, which they deposited
with the fine composure of ignorance. Monsieur Vernier--such was the
name of this great little man--was just finishing his breakfast, with
his wife and daughter on either side of him, when Gaudissart entered
the room through a window that looked out on the Loire and the Cher,
and lighted one of the gayest dining-rooms of that gay land.
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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 American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: the steamer stopping en route to pick up a night's catch of one
of the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver it at a cannery
down-stream.
When the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was two
thousand two hundred and thirty pounds weight of fish, "and not a
heavy catch neither," I thought he lied. But he sent the boxes
aboard, and I counted the salmon by the hundred--huge
fifty-pounders hardly dead, scores of twenty and thirty pounders,
and a host of smaller fish. They were all Chenook salmon, as
distinguished from the "steel head" and the "silver side." That
is to say, they were royal salmon, and California and I dropped a
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