| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: ION: The art of medicine.
SOCRATES: And when Homer says,
'And she descended into the deep like a leaden plummet, which, set in the
horn of ox that ranges in the fields, rushes along carrying death among the
ravenous fishes (Il.),'--
will the art of the fisherman or of the rhapsode be better able to judge
whether these lines are rightly expressed or not?
ION: Clearly, Socrates, the art of the fisherman.
SOCRATES: Come now, suppose that you were to say to me: 'Since you,
Socrates, are able to assign different passages in Homer to their
corresponding arts, I wish that you would tell me what are the passages of
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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 Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: to-day. These people, though they seem young enough, look so angular
and so crude that they remind him of the little pictures painted by
monks in the capital letters of their manuscripts. He only half
understands what they say, and speaks very loud and clearly, as
though, indeed, his voice had to carry through a hundred years or more
before it reached them. He would have a far better chance of
understanding some dweller in Paris or Rome, Berlin or Madrid, than
these countrymen of his who have lived for the last two thousand years
not two hundred miles from the City of London.
The Rectory stands about half a mile beyond the village. It is a large
house, and has been growing steadily for some centuries round the
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