| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: of us her laws (and who would care about a state which has no laws?), that
you never stirred out of her; the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not
more stationary in her than you were. And now you run away and forsake
your agreements. Not so, Socrates, if you will take our advice; do not
make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the city.
'For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way, what
good will you do either to yourself or to your friends? That your friends
will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or will lose their
property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if you fly to one of the
neighbouring cities, as, for example, Thebes or Megara, both of which are
well governed, will come to them as an enemy, Socrates, and their
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: of cars; big, burly lighters drifted slowly with widespread
oil-stained sails; monster derricks towered aloft, derricks that
pick up a hundred-ton gun as easily as an ant does a grain of
sand--each floating craft made necessary by some special industry
peculiar to the port of New York, and each unlike any other craft
in the harbor of any other city of the world.
Grogan's house and stables lay just over the brow of this hill, in
a little hollow. The house was a plain, square frame dwelling,
with front and rear verandas, protected by the arching branches of
a big sycamore- tree, and surrounded by a small garden filled with
flaming dahlias and chrysanthemums. Everything about the place
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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 Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of
common life for us - whether it be by giving the most spiritual
interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the most
sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed
from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination
for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things.
For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all,
and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all.
I will not dwell here on what I am sure has delighted you all in
our great Gothic cathedrals. I mean how the artist of that time,
handicraftsman himself in stone or glass, found the best motives
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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 A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: impossible to approach, even unmolested by the opposition of an
enemy.
These successes seemed to promise a more happy event than that which
followed them. It was now winter, a season in which, as the reader
hath been already informed, it is almost impossible to travel in
Aethiopia. The Portuguese unadvisedly engaged themselves in an
enterprise, to march through the whole country, in order to join the
Emperor, who was then in the most remote part of his dominions.
Mahomet, who was in possession of the mountains, being informed by
his spies that the Portuguese were but four hundred, encamped in the
plain of Ballut, and sent a message to the general that he knew the
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