| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: And would have strown it, and are fallen themselves.
'Our enemies have fallen, have fallen: they came,
The woodmen with their axes: lo the tree!
But we will make it faggots for the hearth,
And shape it plank and beam for roof and floor,
And boats and bridges for the use of men.
'Our enemies have fallen, have fallen: they struck;
With their own blows they hurt themselves, nor knew
There dwelt an iron nature in the grain:
The glittering axe was broken in their arms,
Their arms were shattered to the shoulder blade.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: Hunting he lov'd, but love he laugh'd to scorn; 4
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac'd suitor 'gins to woo him.
'Thrice fairer than myself,' thus she began,
'The field's chief flower, sweet above compare, 8
Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves or roses are;
Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life. 12
'Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed,
And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow;
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: twenty lashes on his bare back, and the punishment was to be
administered in the yard which surrounded the court-house.
When Ivan heard the sentence read he looked triumphantly at
Gavryl to see what effect it would produce on him. Gavryl turned
very white on hearing that he was to be treated with such
indignity, and turning his back on the assembly left the room
without uttering a word.
Ivan followed him out, and as he reached his horse he heard
Gavryl saying: "Very well; my spine will burn from the lashes,
but something will burn with greater fierceness in Ivan's
household before long."
The Kreutzer Sonata |
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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: dead faces and dead hands, which did not look like the hands or
the faces of drowned sailors: the ebb was beginning to run
strongly, and these were passing out with it on the other side of
the mouth of the bayou;--perhaps they had been washed into the
marsh during the night, when the great rush of the sea came.
Then the three men left the water, and retired to higher ground
to scan the furrowed Gulf;--their practiced eyes began to search
the courses of the sea-currents,--keen as the gaze of birds that
watch the wake of the plough. And soon the casks and the drift
were forgotten; for it seemed to them that the tide was heavy
with human dead--passing out, processionally, to the great open.
|
