| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: To side this title is impannelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye's moiety, and the dear heart's part:
As thus; mine eye's due is thy outward part,
And my heart's right, thy inward love of heart.
XLVII
Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,
And each doth good turns now unto the other:
When that mine eye is famish'd for a look,
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: anybody that they were not well satisfied of. But, as Richard the
joiner and one of the other men who parleyed with them told them, it
was no reason why they should block up the roads and refuse to let
people pass through the town, and who asked nothing of them but to
go through the street; that if their people were afraid of them, they
might go into their houses and shut their doors; they would neither
show them civility nor incivility, but go on about their business.
The constables and attendants, not to be persuaded by reason,
continued obstinate, and would hearken to nothing; so the two men
that talked with them went back to their fellows to consult what was
to be done. It was very discouraging in the whole, and they knew not
A Journal of the Plague Year |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: He was a hidden God, full of secrecy. Verily, he did not come by his son
otherwise than by secret ways. At the door of his faith standeth adultery.
Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of
love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one
loveth irrespective of reward and requital.
When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and
revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.
At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like
a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.
There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney-corner, fretting on account of
his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
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 The Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: provost of Eton College, Sir Henry Wotton, a man with whom I have
often fished and conversed, a man whose foreign employments in the
service of this nation, and whose experience, learning, wit, and
cheerfulness, made his company to be esteemed one of the delights of
mankind. This man, whose very approbation of Angling were sufficient
to convince any modest censurer of it, this man was also a most dear
lover, and a frequent practiser of the art of Angling; of which he would
say, " it was an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly
spent "; for Angling was, after tedious study, "a rest to his mind, a
cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet
thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness; and that
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