| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: what she said about Mrs. Erlynne. She didn't leave a rag on her.
. . [Aside.] Berwick and I told her that didn't matter much, as
the lady in question must have an extremely fine figure. You
should have seen Arabella's expression! . . . But, look here, dear
boy. I don't know what to do about Mrs. Erlynne. Egad! I might
be married to her; she treats me with such demmed indifference.
She's deuced clever, too! She explains everything. Egad! she
explains you. She has got any amount of explanations for you - and
all of them different.
LORD WINDERMERE. No explanations are necessary about my friendship
with Mrs. Erlynne.
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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 Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: 'I have debated, even in my soul,
What wrong, what shame, what sorrow I shall breed;
But nothing can Affection's course control,
Or stop the headlong fury of his speed.
I know repentant tears ensue the deed,
Reproach, disdain, and deadly enmity;
Yet strike I to embrace mine infamy.'
This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade,
Which, like a falcon towering in the skies,
Coucheth the fowl below with his wings' shade,
Whose crooked beak threats if he mount he dies:
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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 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: more Jurgis began to make plans and dream dreams.
And then one Saturday night he jumped off the car and started
home, with the sun shining low under the edge of a bank of clouds
that had been pouring floods of water into the mud-soaked street.
There was a rainbow in the sky, and another in his breast--for he
had thirty-six hours' rest before him, and a chance to see his
family. Then suddenly he came in sight of the house, and noticed
that there was a crowd before the door. He ran up the steps and
pushed his way in, and saw Aniele's kitchen crowded with excited
women. It reminded him so vividly of the time when he had come
home from jail and found Ona dying, that his heart almost stood
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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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis
of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, was not
allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and
spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch,
and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal
French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and
everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does
not spring from within through some spirit informing it. But
wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and
under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in ROMEO
AND JULIET, in the WINTER'S TALE, in Provencal poetry, in the
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