| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: XI.
Indeed, it is less than nothing, and I have seen, when the great
soul of the world turned over with a heavy sigh, a perfectly new,
extra-stout foresail vanish like a bit of some airy stuff much
lighter than gossamer. Then was the time for the tall spars to
stand fast in the great uproar. The machinery must do its work
even if the soul of the world has gone mad.
The modern steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea
with a pulsating tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in her
depths, as if she had an iron heart in her iron body; with a
thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her
 The Mirror of the Sea |
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 Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: as you may always hear when three or four young women sit at
work together.
"What a sweet song that was!" exclaimed one of the voyagers.
"Too sweet, indeed," answered Eurylochus, shaking his head.
"Yet it was not so sweet as the song of the Sirens, those
bird-like damsels who wanted to tempt us on the rocks, so that
our vessel might be wrecked, and our bones left whitening along
the shore."
"But just listen to the pleasant voices of those maidens, and
that buzz of the loom, as the shuttle passes to and fro," said
another comrade. "What a domestic, household, home-like sound
 Tanglewood Tales |