| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling: In Cisco's Dewdrop Dining-Rooms
They tell the tale anew
Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight,
When the ~Baltic~ ran from the ~Northern Light~
And the ~Stralsund~ fought the two.
Now this is the Law of the Muscovite, that he proves with shot and steel,
When ye come by his isles in the Smoky Sea ye must not take the seal,
Where the gray sea goes nakedly between the weed-hung shelves,
And the little blue fox he is bred for his skin
and the seal they breed for themselves;
Verses 1889-1896 |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: said Jim. "I'll put your pipe out in that quarter, my friend.
Here, rout out your traps as quick as look at it, and take your
vermin along with you. I'll have a captain in, this very night,
that's a sailor, and some sailors to work for him."
"I'll go when I please, and that's to-morrow morning," cried the
captain after us, as we departed for the shore.
"There's something gone wrong with the world to-day; it must
have come bottom up!" wailed Pinkerton. "Bellairs, and then
the hotel clerk, and now This Fraud! And what am I to do for a
captain, Loudon, with Longhurst gone home an hour ago, and
the boys all scattered?"
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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 Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: "Hush--father's up-stairs awake, and he don't know that I am doing
his work."
"Well, now tell me," said the man, more softly. "How much do you
get?"
"Eighteenpence a thousand," she said, reluctantly.
"Who are you making them for?"
"Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here."
"And how many can you make in a day?"
"In a day and half the night, three bundles--that's a thousand and
a half."
"Two and threepence." The barber paused. "Well, look here," he
The Woodlanders |
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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: fit to take none. There were not wanting writers and thinkers who saw
clearly the end to which the enervation of the female was tending, and who
were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was," cries one Roman
writer of that age, "when the matron turned the spindle with the hand and
kept at the same time the pot in her eye that the pottage might not be
singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels,
reposes among pillows, or seeks the dissipation of baths and theatres, all
things go downward and the state decays." Yet neither he nor that large
body of writers and thinkers who saw the condition towards which the
parasitism of woman was tending to reduce society, preached any adequate
remedy. (Indeed, must not the protest and the remedy in all such cases, if
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