| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: for instance, they were quite unknown. Mr. Mahaffy, it is true,
tells us that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies
of Athenian society in order to induce them to sit to his friend
Phidias, and we know that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of
the Trojan women the face of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the
great Conservative leader of the day, but these GRANDES DAMES
clearly do not come under our category. As for the old masters,
they undoubtedly made constant studies from their pupils and
apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the
portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to
have had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of
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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 Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Such fine weather seldom lasts through the whole of the harvest
And we're bringing the fruit home, just as the hay we brought lately,
Perfectly dry; the sky is clear, no cloud's in the heavens,
And the whole day long delicious breezes are blowing.
Splendid weather I call it! The corn already too ripe is,
And to-morrow begin we to gather the plentiful harvest."
Whilst he was thus discoursing, the number of men and of women
Crossing the market and going towards home kept ever increasing;
And there return'd amongst others, bringing with him his daughters,
On the other side of the market, their prosperous neighbour,
Going full speed to his newbuilt house, the principal merchant,
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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 Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: In their whorls as of cyclonic sound;
Her passions have torn me and tossed me and
brayed me;
Drunken and tranced and dazzled with visions
and gleams,
I have spun with her dervish priests;
I have searched to the souls of her hunted beasts
And found love sleeping there;
I have soared on the wings of her flashing dreams;
I have sunk with her dull despair;
I have sweat with her travails and cursed with
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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 Sophist by Plato: succession of philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of
the age of Socrates, who appeared like meteors for a short time in
different parts of Greece. For the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have
been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the
Apology. But there is no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so
many outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of
Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid
foreigners who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic
games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested
seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an
argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an
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