| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: Bruised and bleeding.
XIX.
If ever your feet, like my own,
O reader, have traversed these mountains alone,
Have you felt your identity shrink and contract
At the sound of the distant and dim cataract,
In the presence of nature's immensities? Say,
Have you hung o'er the torrent, bedew'd with its spray,
And, leaving the rock-way, contorted and roll'd,
Like a huge couchant Typhon, fold heaped over fold,
Track'd the summits from which every step that you tread
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Vailima Prayers & Sabbath Morn by Robert Louis Stevenson: that, our maker, the dispenser of events - Thou, of the vast
designs, in which we blindly labour, suffer us to be so far
constant to ourselves and our beloved.
FOR FRIENDS
FOR our absent loved ones we implore thy loving-kindness. Keep
them in life, keep them in growing honour; and for us, grant that
we remain worthy of their love. For Christ's sake, let not our
beloved blush for us, nor we for them. Grant us but that, and
grant us courage to endure lesser ills unshaken, and to accept
death, loss, and disappointment as it were straws upon the tide of
life.
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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 House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: The soft grey clouds go over the stars like dreams.
The cool stone wounds her arms to pain, to pleasure.
Under the lamp a circle of wet street gleams. . . .
And death seems far away, a thing of roses,
A golden portal, where golden music closes,
Death seems far away:
And spring returns, the countless singing of lovers,
And spring returns to stay. . . .
He, in the room above, grown old and tired,
Flings himself on the bed, face down, in laughter,
And clenches his hands, and remembers, and desires to die.
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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 Symposium by Plato: Laches in presence of mind. Many are the marvels which I might narrate in
praise of Socrates; most of his ways might perhaps be paralleled in another
man, but his absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has
been is perfectly astonishing. You may imagine Brasidas and others to have
been like Achilles; or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like
Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men, but of this strange
being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either
among men who now are or who ever have been--other than that which I have
already suggested of Silenus and the satyrs; and they represent in a figure
not only himself, but his words. For, although I forgot to mention this to
you before, his words are like the images of Silenus which open; they are
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