| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: It cannot be but thou hast murdred him,
So should a murtherer looke, so dead, so grim
Dem. So should the murderer looke, and so should I,
Pierst through the heart with your stearne cruelty:
Yet you the murderer lookes as bright as cleare,
As yonder Venus in her glimmering spheare
Her. What's this to my Lysander? where is he?
Ah good Demetrius, wilt thou giue him me?
Dem. I'de rather giue his carkasse to my hounds
Her. Out dog, out cur, thou driu'st me past the bounds
Of maidens patience. Hast thou slaine him then?
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare: The Lord forbid! Return, and tell the king,
My tongue is made of steel, and it shall beg
My mercy on his coward burgonet;
Tell him, my colours are as red as his,
My men as bold, our English arms as strong:
Return him my defiance in his face.
HERALD.
I go.
[Exit.]
[Enter another Herald.]
PRINCE EDWARD.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: is the fact that in listening for upwards of twenty years to the
sea-talk that goes on afloat and ashore I have never detected the
true note of animosity. I won't deny that at sea, sometimes, the
note of profanity was audible enough in those chiding
interpellations a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his ship,
and in moments of exasperation is disposed to extend to all ships
that ever were launched - to the whole everlastingly exacting brood
that swims in deep waters. And I have heard curses launched at the
unstable element itself, whose fascination, outlasting the
accumulated experience of ages, had captured him as it had captured
the generations of his forebears.
The Mirror of the Sea |
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 The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: brave, miss."
But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but
there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood,
that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw
nothing.
She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint
Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who
did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an
inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell
her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she
be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work.
|
