| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton: for what it really was: another pretext to lessen his own
delinquency.
"Why should our good time be over?" he asked. "Why
shouldn't it last a little longer?"
She looked up, her lips parted in surprise; but before she
could speak he went on: "I want you to stay with me--I want
you, just for a few days, to have all the things you've
never had. It's not always May and Paris--why not make the
most of them now? You know me--we're not strangers--why
shouldn't you treat me like a friend?"
While he spoke she had drawn away a little, but her hand
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: and of the essence, these three, and is divided and united in due
proportion, and in her revolutions returns upon herself, the soul, when
touching anything which has essence, whether dispersed in parts or
undivided, is stirred through all her powers, to declare the sameness or
difference of that thing and some other; and to what individuals are
related, and by what affected, and in what way and how and when, both in
the world of generation and in the world of immutable being. And when
reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the
diverse or of the same--in voiceless silence holding her onward course in
the sphere of the self-moved--when reason, I say, is hovering around the
sensible world and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts
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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 Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: I
As long as Fame's imperious music rings
Will poets mock it with crowned words august;
And haggard men will clamber to be kings
As long as Glory weighs itself in dust.
II
Drink to the splendor of the unfulfilled,
Nor shudder for the revels that are done:
The wines that flushed Lucullus are all spilled,
The strings that Nero fingered are all gone.
III
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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 Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: for the Unpardonable Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had now
elapsed, since that portentous night when the IDEA was first
developed. The kiln, however, on the mountain-side, stood
unimpaired, and was in nothing changed since he had thrown his
dark thoughts into the intense glow of its furnace, and melted
them, as it were, into the one thought that took possession of
his life. It was a rude, round, tower-like structure about twenty
feet high, heavily built of rough stones, and with a hillock of
earth heaped about the larger part of its circumference; so that
the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn by cart-loads,
and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the bottom of
The Snow Image |
