| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: My joys ungarnered, all my songs unsung,
And all my tears unshed.
Tarry a while, till I am satisfied
Of love and grief, of earth and altering sky;
Till all my human hungers are fulfilled,
O Death, I cannot die!
THE INDIAN GIPSY
In tattered robes that hoard a glittering trace
Of bygone colours, broidered to the knee,
Behold her, daughter of a wandering race,
Tameless, with the bold falcon's agile grace,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: the nostrils. His pimpled skin, his long, thick, brick-dust colored
nose, his high cheek-bones, his mouth, lacking half its teeth but
greedy for all that and menacing, his ears adorned with huge gold
rings, his low forehead,--all these personal details, which might have
seemed grotesque in many men, were rendered terrible in him by two
small eyes set in his head like those of a pig, expressive of
insatiable covetousness, and of insolent, half-jovial cruelty. These
ferreting and perspicacious blue eyes, glassy and glacial, might be
taken for the model of that famous Eye, the formidable emblem of the
police, invented during the Revolution. Black silk gloves were on his
hands and he carried a switch. He was certainly some official
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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 Philebus by Plato: casuistical uncertainty of morals from the practical certainty. There is
an uncertainty about details,--whether, for example, under given
circumstances such and such a moral principle is to be enforced, or whether
in some cases there may not be a conflict of duties: these are the
exceptions to the ordinary rules of morality, important, indeed, but not
extending to the one thousandth or one ten-thousandth part of human
actions. This is the domain of casuistry. Secondly, the aspects under
which the most general principles of morals may be presented to us are many
and various. The mind of man has been more than usually active in thinking
about man. The conceptions of harmony, happiness, right, freedom,
benevolence, self-love, have all of them seemed to some philosopher or
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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 Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: The largest number of kinds and differing shapes
Of elements. And, chief of all, the earth
Hath in herself first bodies whence the springs,
Rolling chill waters, renew forevermore
The unmeasured main; hath whence the fires arise-
For burns in many a spot her flamed crust,
Whilst the impetuous Aetna raves indeed
From more profounder fires- and she, again,
Hath in herself the seed whence she can raise
The shining grains and gladsome trees for men;
Whence, also, rivers, fronds, and gladsome pastures
Of The Nature of Things |
