The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: Where I shall never be;
Love comes to-night to all the rest,
But not to me.
Song at Capri
When beauty grows too great to bear
How shall I ease me of its ache,
For beauty more than bitterness
Makes the heart break.
Now while I watch the dreaming sea
With isles like flowers against her breast,
Only one voice in all the world
|
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 Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John of Damascus: creation, visible and invisible, how the Creator brought every
thing out of nothing, and how he formed man after his own image
and likeness and endowed him with power of free-will, and gave
him Paradise to his enjoyment, charging him only to abstain from
one thing, the tree of knowledge; and how, when man had broken
his commandment, he banished him out of Paradise; and how man,
fallen from union with God, stumbled into these manifold errors,
becoming the slave of sins, and subject unto death through the
tyranny of the devil, who, having once taken men captive, hath
made them utterly forget their Lord and God, and hath persuaded
them to serve him instead, by the abominable worshipping of
|