| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare: ARCITE.
Let's thinke this prison holy sanctuary,
To keepe us from corruption of worse men.
We are young and yet desire the waies of honour,
That liberty and common Conversation,
The poyson of pure spirits, might like women
Wooe us to wander from. What worthy blessing
Can be but our Imaginations
May make it ours? And heere being thus together,
We are an endles mine to one another;
We are one anothers wife, ever begetting
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: springs which move the panels. By pressing a knob thus hidden, the
queen was able to open certain panels known to her alone, behind
which, sunk in the wall, were hiding-places, oblong like the panels,
and more or less deep. It is difficult, even in these days of
dilapidation, for the best-trained eye to detect which of those panels
is thus hinged; but when the eye was distracted by colors and gilding,
cleverly used to conceal the joints, we can readily conceive that to
find one or two such panels among two hundred was almost an impossible
thing.
At the moment when Mary Stuart laid her hand on the somewhat
complicated lock of the door of this oratory, the queen-mother, who
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: work of splicing this Constitution, of discussing and voting, Cavaignac,
on the outside, maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of
siege of Paris was the midwife of the constitutional assembly, during
its republican pains of travail. When the Constitution is later on
swept off the earth by the bayonet,
it should not be forgotten that it was by the bayonet, likewise--and the
bayonet turned against the people, at that--that it had to be protected
in its mother's womb, and that by the bayonet it had to be planted on
earth. The ancestors of these "honest republicans" had caused their
symbol, the tricolor, to make the tour of Europe. These, in their turn
also made a discovery, which all of itself, found its way over the whole
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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 Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: To the plains and the prairies where pools are far apart,
There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies,
And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your heart.
"Did You Never Know?"
Did you never know, long ago, how much you loved me --
That your love would never lessen and never go?
You were young then, proud and fresh-hearted,
You were too young to know.
Fate is a wind, and red leaves fly before it
Far apart, far away in the gusty time of year --
Seldom we meet now, but when I hear you speaking,
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