| 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: 'Farewell,' quoth she, 'and come again tomorrow:
Fare well I could not, for I supp'd with sorrow.
Yet at my parting sweetly did she smile,
In scorn or friendship, nill I construe whether:
'T may be, she joy'd to jest at my exile,
'T may be, again to make me wander thither:
'Wander,' a word for shadows like myself,
As take the pain, but cannot pluck the pelf.
XV.
Lord, how mine eyes throw gazes to the east!
My heart doth charge the watch; the morning rise
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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 Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: nothing to deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on
talking about everything in debate between himself and Brissago
except----.
Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they
had had to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it
be that even now while this fool babbled, they were over there
among the mountains heaving their deadly charge over the side of
the aeroplane?
Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.
What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one
knew. At any moment the little brass door behind him might open
The Last War: A World Set Free |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: legislative body, in short, of the total power of the State, morally
strengthened by the general elections, that caused their sovereignty to
appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous victory of the
counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.
Never did party open its campaign with larger means at its disposal and
under more favorable auspices.
The shipwrecked pure republicans found themselves in the legislative
National Assembly melted down to a clique of fifty men, with the African
Generals Cavaignac, Lamorciere and Bedeau at its head. The great
Opposition party was, however, formed by the Mountain. This
parliamentary baptismal name was given to itself by the Social
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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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody,
including the workers themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken,
foul-mouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to
the peculiar ills of poverty and slavery, as well as co-heirs with the
plutocracy to all the failings of human nature. Even Shelley
admitted, 200 years after Shakespear wrote Coriolanus, that universal
suffrage was out of the question. Surely the real test, not of
Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespear's time,
but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from
a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and
denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same
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