| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: You, at whose step the laziest slaves awake,
And both the bailiff and the butler quake;
The barber's suds now blacken with my beard,
And my rough kisses make the maids afeared;
But with reproach your awful eyebrows twitch,
And for the cane, I see, your fingers itch.
If something daintily attired I go,
Straight you exclaim: "Your father did not so."
And fuming, count the bottles on the board
As though my cellar were your private hoard.
Enough, at last: I have done all I can,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: resolved to stand on defensive and conservative ground,--mentally
determined to oppose and ignore every new measure, without any
actual observable contest.
The kitchen was a large brick-floored apartment, with a great
old-fashioned fireplace stretching along one side of it,--an
arrangement which St. Clare had vainly tried to persuade Dinah to
exchange for the convenience of a modern cook-stove. Not she. No
Puseyite,[1] or conservative of any school, was ever more inflexibly
attached to time-honored inconveniences than Dinah.
[1] Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), champion of the orthodoxy
of revealed religion, defender of the Oxford movement, and Regius
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Poems of William Blake by William Blake: Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.
The Lilly of the valley breathing in the humble grass
Answerd the lovely maid and said: I am a watry weed,
And I am very small and love to dwell in lowly vales:
So weak the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head
Yet I am visited from heaven and he that smiles on all
Walks in the valley, and each morn over me spreads his hand
Saying, rejoice thou humble grass, thou new-born lily flower.
Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks:
For thou shall be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna:
Till summers heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs
Poems of William Blake |
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 The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare: This great adventure to a second Tryall:
I know your cunning, and I know your cause;
He that faints now, shame take him: put thy selfe
Vpon thy present guard--
ARCITE.
You are not mad?
PALAMON.
Or I will make th'advantage of this howre
Mine owne, and what to come shall threaten me,
I feare lesse then my fortune: know, weake Cosen,
I love Emilia, and in that ile bury
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