| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: Whose bare out-bragg'd the web it seemed to wear:
Yet show'd his visage by that cost more dear;
And nice affections wavering stood in doubt
If best were as it was, or best without.
His qualities were beauteous as his form,
For maiden-tongued he was, and thereof free;
Yet if men mov'd him, was he such a storm
As oft 'twixt May and April is to see,
When winds breathe sweet, unruly though they be.
His rudeness so with his authoriz'd youth
Did livery falseness in a pride of truth.
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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 Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: he would be on me. I took comfort, however, from the reflection that a
lion rarely attacks a man--rarely, I say; sometimes he does, as you will
see--unless he is cornered or wounded. I must have been nearly an hour
hunting after that lion. Once I thought I saw something move in a clump
of tambouki grass, but I could not be sure, and when I trod out the
grass I could not find him.
"At last I worked up to the head of the kloof, which made a cul-de-sac.
It was formed of a wall of rock about fifty feet high. Down this rock
trickled a little waterfall, and in front of it, some seventy feet from
its face, rose a great piled-up mass of boulders, in the crevices and on
the top of which grew ferns, grasses, and stunted bushes. This mass was
Long Odds |
