| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: All these roses are dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden,
two Madame George Bruants, and they look like broomsticks.
How I long for the day when the tea-roses open their buds!
Never did I look forward so intensely to anything; and every day I
go the rounds, admiring what the dear little things have achieved
in the twentyfour hours in the way of new leaf or increase of
lovely red shoot.
The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south
windows in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot
of which I have sown two long borders of sweetpeas facing the rose beds,
so that my roses may have something almost as sweet as themselves to look
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
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 Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: word, we mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That
thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first
infirmity of weak ones; and, on the whole, the strongest impulsive
influence of average humanity: the greatest efforts of the race
have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest
catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want you only to
feel how it lies at the root of effort; especially of all modern
effort. It is the gratification of vanity which is, with us, the
stimulus of toil and balm of repose; so closely does it touch the
very springs of life that the wounding of our vanity is always
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