| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: And on thy well-breath'd horse keep with thy hound.
'And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles 680
How he outruns the winds, and with what care
He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles:
The many musits through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. 684
'Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep,
To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
To stop the loud pursuers in their yell, 688
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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 Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: In the increasing light of the moon that had risen now above the
night mist, the objects on the verandah came out strongly
outlined in black splashes of shadow with all the uncompromising
ugliness of their disorder, and a caricature of the sleeping
Almayer appeared on the dirty whitewash of the wall behind him in
a grotesquely exaggerated detail of attitude and feature enlarged
to a heroic size. The discontented bats departed in quest of
darker places, and a lizard came out in short, nervous rushes,
and, pleased with the white table-cloth, stopped on it in
breathless immobility that would have suggested sudden death had
it not been for the melodious call he exchanged with a less
Almayer's Folly |
