| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: 'In him a plenitude of subtle matter,
Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives,
Of burning blushes or of weeping water,
Or swooning paleness; and he takes and leaves,
In either's aptness, as it best deceives,
To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,
Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows;
'That not a heart which in his level came
Could scape the hail of his all-hurting aim,
Showing fair nature is both kind and tame;
And, veil'd in them, did win whom he would maim:
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare: Enter Gloucester, led by an Old Man.
But who comes here?
My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age.
Old Man. O my good lord,
I have been your tenant, and your father's tenant,
These fourscore years.
Glou. Away, get thee away! Good friend, be gone.
Thy comforts can do me no good at all;
Thee they may hurt.
King Lear |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: feared that when a vacancy did occur the best servants
were by no means sure of being treated fairly. Besides,
the captain he had to serve under--Captain Provost--
was an unaccountable sort of man, and, he fancied, had
taken a dislike to him for some reason or other. For
doing rather more than his bare duty as likely as not.
When he had done anything wrong he could take a
talking to, like a man; but he expected to be treated
like a man too, and not to be addressed invariably as
though he were a dog. He had asked Captain Provost
plump and plain to tell him where he was at fault, and
End of the Tether |
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 Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: they caught the Interlaken express, and so went by way of Spies
to Frutigen. There was no railway beyond Frutigen in those
days; they sent their baggage by post to Kandersteg, and walked
along the mule path to the left of the stream to that queer
hollow among the precipices, Blau See, where the petrifying
branches of trees lie in the blue deeps of an icy lake, and
pine-trees clamber among gigantic boulders. A little inn flying
a Swiss flag nestles under a great rock, and there they put aside
their knapsacks and lunched and rested in the mid-day shadow of
the gorge and the scent of resin. And later they paddled in a
boat above the mysterious deeps of the See, and peered down into
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