| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.
One, whom the city imprisoned because of his cunning,
Who dreamed for years in a tower,
Seizes this hour
Of tumult and wind. He files through the rusted bar,
Leans his face to the rain, laughs up at the night,
Slides down the knotted sheet, swings over the wall,
To fall to the street with a cat-like fall,
Slinks round a quavering rim of windy light,
And at last is gone,
Leaving his empty cell for the pallor of dawn . . .
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Richard III by William Shakespeare: RIVERS, GREY, and VAUGHAN, to death
RIVERS. Sir Richard Ratcliff, let me tell thee this:
To-day shalt thou behold a subject die
For truth, for duty, and for loyalty.
GREY. God bless the Prince from all the pack of you!
A knot you are of damned blood-suckers.
VAUGHAN. You live that shall cry woe for this hereafter.
RATCLIFF. Dispatch; the limit of your lives is out.
RIVERS. O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!
Within the guilty closure of thy walls
Richard III |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: Before the railway was made, when people still had to drive,
Fet, on his way into Moscow, always used to turn in at
Yásnaya Polyána to see my father, and these visits
became an established custom. Afterward, when the railway was made
and my father was already married, Afanásyi
Afanásyevitch still never passed our house without coming
in, and if he did,
¹Tolstoy's sister. She became a nun after her husband's
death and the marriage of her three daughters.
²Tolstoy was in the artillery, and commanded a battery in
the Crimea.
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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 A Collection of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: the inside of the pie-dish.
"My Great-aunt Squintina
(grandmother of Cousin Tabitha
Twitchit)--died of a thimble in a
Christmas plum-pudding. _I_ never
put any article of metal in MY
puddings or pies."
Duchess looked aghast, and
tilted up the pie-dish.
"I have only four patty-pans,
and they are all in the cupboard."
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