| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: What breast so cold that is not warmed here?
O cleft effect! cold modesty, hot wrath,
Both fire from hence and chill extincture hath.
'For lo! his passion, but an art of craft,
Even there resolv'd my reason into tears;
There my white stole of chastity I daff'd,
Shook off my sober guards, and civil fears;
Appear to him, as he to me appears,
All melting; though our drops this difference bore:
His poison'd me, and mine did him restore.
'In him a plenitude of subtle matter,
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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 Human Drift by Jack London: infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In Africa,
now, human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.
More destructive of life than war, is industry. In all civilised
countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and
labour-ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine
is chronic, and where they die more swiftly and in greater numbers
than do the soldiers in our modern wars. The very infant
mortality of a slum parish in the East End of London is three
times that of a middle-class parish in the West End. In the
United States, in the last fourteen years, a total of coal-miners,
greater than our entire standing army, has been killed and
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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 The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: she was gone.
...No, madam, I can't say I noticed it. Perhaps some girls. But you see,
it's like this, I've got nobody but my lady. My mother died of consumption
when I was four, and I lived with my grandfather, who kept a hair-dresser's
shop. I used to spend all my time in the shop under a table dressing my
doll's hair--copying the assistants, I suppose. They were ever so kind to
me. Used to make me little wigs, all colours, the latest fashions and all.
And there I'd sit all day, quiet as quiet--the customers never knew. Only
now and again I'd take my peep from under the table-cloth.
...But one day I managed to get a pair of scissors and--would you believe
it, madam? I cut off all my hair; snipped it off all in bits, like the
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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 Poems by Oscar Wilde: black throat is like the hole
Left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic
tapestries.
Away! The sulphur-coloured stars are hurrying
through the Western gate!
Away! Or it may be too late to climb their silent
silver cars!
See, the dawn shivers round the grey gilt-dialled
towers, and the rain
Streams down each diamonded pane and blurs
with tears the wannish day.
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