| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: By famine forc'd, your trenchers you shall eat,
Then ease your weary Trojans will attend,
And the long labors of your voyage end.
Remember on that happy coast to build,
And with a trench inclose the fruitful field.'
This was that famine, this the fatal place
Which ends the wand'ring of our exil'd race.
Then, on to-morrow's dawn, your care employ,
To search the land, and where the cities lie,
And what the men; but give this day to joy.
Now pour to Jove; and, after Jove is blest,
Aeneid |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: began, not very loud at first, and Little Toomai could not tell
what it was. But it grew and grew, and Kala Nag lifted up one
forefoot and then the other, and brought them down on the ground
--one-two, one-two, as steadily as trip-hammers. The elephants
were stamping all together now, and it sounded like a war drum
beaten at the mouth of a cave. The dew fell from the trees till
there was no more left to fall, and the booming went on, and the
ground rocked and shivered, and Little Toomai put his hands up to
his ears to shut out the sound. But it was all one gigantic jar
that ran through him--this stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on
the raw earth. Once or twice he could feel Kala Nag and all the
The Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon
the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale
and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an
intensity of purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the
intolerable lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An
English painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural
anger that 'the values were all wrong.' Had he got among the Alps on
a bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
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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 Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: France about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized
property. So this is what happens: Any duke--and even in the time of
Louis XVIII. and Charles X. there were some left who had two hundred
thousand francs a year, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous train
of servants--well, such a duke could live like a great lord. The last
of these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand.--This
duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting that he has
great luck in marrying them all well, each of these descendants will
have but sixty or eighty thousand francs a year now; each is the
father or mother of children, and consequently obliged to live with
the strictest economy in a flat on the ground floor or first floor of
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