| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Green forest frame the entry of the lane -
The wild lane with the bramble and the brier,
The year-old cart-tracks perfect in the mire,
The wayside smoke, perchance, the dwarfish huts,
And ramblers' donkey drinking from the ruts: -
Long ere you trace how deviously it leads,
Back from man's chimneys and the bleating meads
To the woodland shadow, to the sylvan hush,
When but the brooklet chuckles in the brush -
Back from the sun and bustle of the vale
To where the great voice of the nightingale
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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 Lysis by Plato: come: but if he does not, Ctesippus with whom he is familiar, and whose
relation Menexenus is his great friend, shall call him.
That will be the way, I said. Thereupon I led Ctesippus into the
Palaestra, and the rest followed.
Upon entering we found that the boys had just been sacrificing; and this
part of the festival was nearly at an end. They were all in their white
array, and games at dice were going on among them. Most of them were in
the outer court amusing themselves; but some were in a corner of the
Apodyterium playing at odd and even with a number of dice, which they took
out of little wicker baskets. There was also a circle of lookers-on; among
them was Lysis. He was standing with the other boys and youths, having a
Lysis |
