| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems of William Blake by William Blake: II.
O little Cloud the virgin said, I charge thee to tell me
Why thou complainest now when in one hour thou fade away:
Then we shall seek thee but not find: ah Thel is like to thee.
I pass away, yet I complain, and no one hears my voice.
The Cloud then shewd his golden head & his bright form emerg'd.
Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel.
O virgin know'st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs
Where Luvah doth renew his horses: lookst thou on my youth.
And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more.
Nothing remains; O maid I tell thee, when I pass away.
Poems of William Blake |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: uttered, she summoned strength enough to restore to her plighted
suitor the piece of broken gold which was the emblem of her
troth. On this he burst forth into a tremendous passion, took
leave of the mother with maledictions, and as he left the
apartment, turned back to say to his weak, if not fickle,
mistresss: "For you, madam, you will be a world's wonder"; a
phrase by which some remarkable degree of calamity is usually
implied. He went abroad, and returned not again. If the last
Lord Rutherford was the unfortunate party, he must have been the
third who bore that title, and who died in 1685.
The marriage betwixt Janet Dalrymple and David Dunbar of
The Bride of Lammermoor |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: true in still greater measure of her companion. If she was old, or
almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of
the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him. His
surprises began here; when once they had begun they multiplied;
they came rather with a rush: it was as if, in the oddest way in
the world, they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster,
for the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in
general the unexpected has died out.
One of them was that he should have caught himself--for he HAD so
done--REALLY wondering if the great accident would take form now as
nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman,
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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 Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen: The naughty boy, to shoot the old poet in that way; he who had taken him into
his warm room, who had treated him so kindly, and who had given him warm wine
and the very best apples!
The poor poet lay on the earth and wept, for the arrow had really flown into
his heart.
"Fie!" said he. "How naughty a boy Cupid is! I will tell all children about
him, that they may take care and not play with him, for he will only cause
them sorrow and many a heartache."
And all good children to whom he related this story, took great heed of this
naughty Cupid; but he made fools of them still, for he is astonishingly
cunning. When the university students come from the lectures, he runs beside
Fairy Tales |
