| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: I could have wished to go some other way.
But lightly in the abyss, which swallows up
Judas with Lucifer, he put us down;
Nor thus bowed downward made he there delay,
But, as a mast does in a ship, uprose.
Inferno: Canto XXXII
If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous,
As were appropriate to the dismal hole
Down upon which thrust all the other rocks,
I would press out the juice of my conception
More fully; but because I have them not,
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man,
and men of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash."
Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must be
in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the United States
where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast,
not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored
people there, than in New Bedford. I was amazed when Mr. Johnson told me
that there was nothing in the laws or constitution of Massachusetts
that would prevent a colored man from being governor of the State,
if the people should see fit to elect him. There, too, the black man's
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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 King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: The envious barking of your saucy tongue
Against my lord the Duke of Somerset.
VERNON.
Sirrah, thy lord I honor as he is.
BASSET.
Why, what is he? as good a man as York.
VERNON.
Hark ye; not so: in witness, take ye that.
[Strikes him.]
BASSET.
Villain, thou know'st the law of arms is such
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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 Ion by Plato: they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when
they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their
right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when
falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed;
like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are
under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind.
And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for
they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out
of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their
way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and
winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been
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