| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: caressed him with her hand, and spake and hailed him:
'Knavish thou art, and no weakling {*} in wit, thou that
hast conceived and spoken such a word. Let earth be now
witness hereto, and the wide heaven above, and that falling
water of the Styx, the greatest oath and the most terrible
to the blessed gods, that I will not plan any hidden guile
to thine own hurt. Nay, but my thoughts are such, and such
will be my counsel, as I would devise for myself, if ever
so sore a need came over me. For I too have a righteous
mind, and my heart within me is not of iron, but pitiful
even as thine.'
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles: Olympus their progenitor alone:
Ne'er shall they slumber in oblivion cold,
The god in them is strong and grows not old.
(Ant. 1)
Of insolence is bred
The tyrant; insolence full blown,
With empty riches surfeited,
Scales the precipitous height and grasps the throne.
Then topples o'er and lies in ruin prone;
No foothold on that dizzy steep.
But O may Heaven the true patriot keep
Oedipus Trilogy |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: Scot or Irishman, yet Torbay surely has a soft beauty of its own.
The rounded hills slope gently to the sea, spotted with squares of
emerald grass, and rich red fallow fields, and parks full of
stately timber trees. Long lines of tall elms run down to the very
water's edge, their boughs unwarped by any blast; here and there
apple orchards are bending under their loads of fruit, and narrow
strips of water-meadow line the glens, where the red cattle are
already lounging in richest pastures, within ten yards of the rocky
pebble beach. The shore is silent now, the tide far out: but six
hours hence it will be hurling columns of rosy foam high into the
sunlight, and sprinkling passengers, and cattle, and trim gardens
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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 Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: "you" or "hey." Once she asked cynically if he had ever heard of
a "Rose of Sharon" to which he maliciously replied: "She turned
out to be a Rag-weed."
Yet such a leveller of emotions and an adjuster of disparate
dispositions is Time that when they rounded their fourth year,
Martin viewed his life, with a few reservations, as fairly
satisfactory. He turned the matter over judicially in his mind
and concluded that even though he cared not a jot for Rose, at
least he could think of no other woman who could carry a larger
share of the drudgery in their dusty lives, help save more and,
on the whole, bother him less. He, like his rag-weed, had settled
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