| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: 'Have patience,' I replied, 'ourselves are full
Of social wrong; and maybe wildest dreams
Are but the needful preludes of the truth:
For me, the genial day, the happy crowd,
The sport half-science, fill me with a faith.
This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time
To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides.'
In such discourse we gained the garden rails,
And there we saw Sir Walter where he stood,
Before a tower of crimson holly-hoaks,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Magic of Oz by L. Frank Baum: change the shapes of men or beasts at his will. This stranger has
come to us, with another of his kind, from out of the sky, to warn us
of a danger which threatens us all, and to offer us a way to escape
from that danger. He says he is our friend, and he has proved to me
and to my Counselors his magic powers. Will you listen to what he has
to say to you--to the message he has brought from the sky?"
"Let him speak!" came in a great roar from the great company of
assembled beasts.
So Ruggedo the Nome sprang upon the flat rock beside Gugu the King,
and another roar, gentle this time, showed how astonished the beasts
were at the sight of his curious form. His lion's face was surrounded
The Magic of Oz |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,--
Thy adverse party is thy advocate,--
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence:
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an accessary needs must be,
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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 Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: sounding and taking thought between high ranks of forest whose
trees come out knee-deep at last in the water. There we go
with a little breeze on our quarter, Mordet Island rounded and
the quap, it might be within a day of us.
Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of
green with a trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the
jungle and peeped and dashed back rustling into stillness.
Always in the sluggishly drifting, opaque water were eddyings
and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came chuckling up
light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and
tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of
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