| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: assured keen glance of a sailor, wandered irresolutely
in space, as though he, the discoverer of new routes, had
lost his way upon this narrow sea.
Another white man, the mate, came up on the bridge.
He was tall, young, lean, with a mustache like a
trooper, and something malicious in the eye. He took
up a position beside the engineer. Captain Whalley,
with his back to them, inquired--
"What's on the log?"
"Eighty-five," answered the mate quickly, and nudged
the engineer with his elbow.
End of the Tether |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: [10] See Thuc. i. 131; Plut. "Lys." 19 (Clough, iii. p. 125).
[11] "The Hippagretes (or commander of the three hundred guards called
horsemen, though they were not really mounted)." Grote, "H. G."
vol. ix. p. 349; see "Pol. Lac." iv. 3.
[12] Or, "to those on the way to Aulon."
[13] See for Cinadon's case, Arist. "Pol." v. 7, 3.
IV
B.C. 397.[1] It was after the incidents just recorded that a Syracusan
named Herodas brought news to Lacedaemon. He had chanced to be in
Phoenicia with a certain shipowner, and was struck by the number of
Phoenician triremes which he observed, some coming into harbour from
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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 Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: And the cold stars say:
"Warsaw in Poland
Is half the world away."
Compensation
I should be glad of loneliness
And hours that go on broken wings,
A thirsty body, a tired heart
And the unchanging ache of things,
If I could make a single song
As lovely and as full of light,
As hushed and brief as a falling star
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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 Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: Even the mosquitoes that infested <80> the place were too much in awe
of him to sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and I naturally
concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.
Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my memory
skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was exclusively his.
Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I felt how well I
knew him now from the impressions he made then on my child's mind,
though I was not conscious of them for more than twenty years.
Nobody told me about him, and he died when I was six, and yet within
the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance
that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
