| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: And give it back to me more beautiful.
In many another soul I broke the bread,
And drank the wine and played the happy guest,
But I was lonely, I remembered you;
The heart belongs to him who knew it best.
"Oh You Are Coming"
Oh you are coming, coming, coming,
How will hungry Time put by the hours till then? --
But why does it anger my heart to long so
For one man out of the world of men?
Oh I would live in myself only
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: Jennie longed to bury her teeth in the succulent meat and get one
great, soul-satisfying mouthful. She had to be content with her
judicious nibbling. To pass the golden-brown, breaded pig's feet
was torture. To look at the codfish balls was agony. And so
Jennie went on, sampling, tasting, the scraps of food acting only
as an aggravation. Up one aisle, and down the next she went. And
then, just around the corner, she brought up before the grocery
department's pride and boast, the Scotch bakery. It is the store's
star vaudeville feature. All day long the gaping crowd stands
before it, watching David the Scone Man, as with sleeves rolled
high above his big arms, he kneads, and slaps, and molds, and
Buttered Side Down |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable
pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel
at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron
formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in
the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate
itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence
is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers
bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the
vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms
or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know
nothing.
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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 Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket-money of rich
bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand fight
against prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and
scanty alms, will be a losing one. There was a time when they
were able to urge that though "the white-lead factory where Anne
Jane was poisoned" may be a far more terrible place than Mrs
Warren's house, yet hell is still more dreadful. Nowadays they
no longer believe in hell; and the girls among whom they are
working know that they do not believe in it, and would laugh at
them if they did. So well have the rescuers learnt that Mrs
Warren's defence of herself and indictment of society is the
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