| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: Yet as I saw it, I see it again,
The kirk and the palace, the ships and the men,
And as long as I live and where'er I may be,
I'll always remember my town by the sea.
VII
The Land of Story-books
At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.
Now, with my little gun, I crawl
A Child's Garden of Verses |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: III. INTERLUDE
The warm sun dreams in the dust, the warm sun falls
On bright red roofs and walls;
The trees in the park exhale a ghost of rain;
We go from door to door in the streets again,
Talking, laughing, dreaming, turning our faces,
Recalling other times and places . . .
We crowd, not knowing why, around a gate,
We crowd together and wait,
A stretcher is carried out, voices are stilled,
The ambulance drives away.
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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 The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: a Roman Consul, or an Emperor, and that Alexander was either a Greek
or a Macedonian; he would have conceded either quality or origin in
both cases without discussion. If the conversation turned on science
or history, he was wont to become thoughtful, and to confine his share
in it to little approving nods, like a man who by dint of profound
thought has arrived at scepticism.
When, at Schonbrunn, on May 13, 1809, Napoleon wrote the bulletin
addressed to the Grand Army, then the masters of Vienna, in which he
said that like Medea, the Austrian princes had slain their children
with their own hands; Genestas, who had been recently made a captain,
did not wish to compromise his newly conferred dignity by asking who
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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 Dreams by Olive Schreiner: they gathered in great company about when a large stone was found, and
raised a great shout so that the sky rang; then they worked on again.
And I asked God what they did with the stones they found at last. Then God
touched my eyes again to make them stronger; and I looked, and at my very
feet was a mighty crown. The light streamed out from it.
God said, "Each stone as they find it is set here."
And the crown was wrought according to a marvellous pattern; one pattern
ran through all, yet each part was different.
I said to God, "How does each man know where to set his stone, so that the
pattern is worked out?"
God said, "Because in the light his forehead sheds each man sees faintly
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