| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: To keep one's life free and inviolate,
From our sad lips another song is rung,
By our own hands our heads are desecrate,
Wanderers in drear exile, and dispossessed
Of what should be our own, we can but feed on wild unrest.
Somehow the grace, the bloom of things has flown,
And of all men we are most wretched who
Must live each other's lives and not our own
For very pity's sake and then undo
All that we lived for - it was otherwise
When soul and body seemed to blend in mystic symphonies.
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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 Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare: For I will greet him, ere he thinks I will.
Away, be gone; the smoke but of our shot
Will choke our foes, though bullets hit them not.
[Exit.]
ACT IV. SCENE VI. The same. A Part of the Field
of Battle.
[Alarum. Enter prince Edward and Artois.]
ARTOIS.
How fares your grace? are you not shot, my Lord?
PRINCE EDWARD.
No, dear Artois; but choked with dust and smoke,
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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 My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had
been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot
now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe
occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first
images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.
This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read
alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she
had had formed out of a human skull. One night this strange
piece of furniture acquired suddenly the power of locomotion,
and, after performing some odd circles on her chimney-piece,
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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 Georgics by Virgil: Our fallen generation to repair
Forbid not. To the full and long ago
Our blood thy Trojan perjuries hath paid,
Laomedon. Long since the courts of heaven
Begrudge us thee, our Caesar, and complain
That thou regard'st the triumphs of mankind,
Here where the wrong is right, the right is wrong,
Where wars abound so many, and myriad-faced
Is crime; where no meet honour hath the plough;
The fields, their husbandmen led far away,
Rot in neglect, and curved pruning-hooks
Georgics |
