The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: Ill roaming is it on Libya's lonely plains.
Mark you what shivering thrills the horse's frame,
If but a waft the well-known gust conveys?
Nor curb can check them then, nor lash severe,
Nor rocks and caverned crags, nor barrier-floods,
That rend and whirl and wash the hills away.
Then speeds amain the great Sabellian boar,
His tushes whets, with forefoot tears the ground,
Rubs 'gainst a tree his flanks, and to and fro
Hardens each wallowing shoulder to the wound.
What of the youth, when love's relentless might
 Georgics |
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 Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can
neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither
build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they
can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing till they arrive
at six years old; except where they are of towardly parts,
although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during
which time they can however be properly looked upon only as
probationers: As I have been informed by a principal gentleman in
the county of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew
above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part
of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that
 A Modest Proposal |