| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: For losing ken of Albion's wished coast.
How often have I tempted Suffolk's tongue,
The agent of thy foul inconstancy,
To sit and witch me, as Ascanius did
When he to madding Dido would unfold
His father's acts commenc'd in burning Troy!
Am I not witch'd like her? or thou not false like him?
Ay me, I can no more! die, Margaret!
For Henry weeps that thou dost live so long.
[Noise within. Enter WARWICK, SALISBURY, and many Commons.]
WARWICK.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: folly from the consequences of which he had been saved by the
providence that watches over madmen. He had little leisure to
observe Alexa; but he concluded that the common-sense momentarily
denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance of the
inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the
passionate justness that had once seemed to characterize her, he
accepted the alternative as a part of that general lowering of the
key that seems needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet.
What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice where
another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had
profited by Mrs. Aubyn's tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to
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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 Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: The strong, suffumigating blaze,
Or knot the wizard leaf: none more,
Upon the untrodden windward shore
Of the isle, beside the beating main,
To cure the sickly and constrain,
With muttered words and waving rods,
The gibbering and the whistling gods.
But he, though thus with hand and head
He ruled, commanded, charmed, and led,
And thus in virtue and in might
Towered to contemporary sight -
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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 Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: Would the passage at the second
level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked
and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible
entity - a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown
trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future -
had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
I
shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort
to drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then,
for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness
of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realized that a vast chain
Shadow out of Time |
