| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: To me, who with eternal famine pine,
Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven;
There best, where most with ravine I may meet;
Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems
To stuff this maw, this vast unhide-bound corps.
To whom the incestuous mother thus replied.
Thou therefore on these herbs, and fruits, and flowers,
Feed first; on each beast next, and fish, and fowl;
No homely morsels! and, whatever thing
The sithe of Time mows down, devour unspared;
Till I, in Man residing, through the race,
Paradise Lost |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: But what effect will all the words convey
Wherein with eager zeal and lovingly,
That I might win thy favour, labour'd I,
If on thine ear alone they die away?
Therefore, sweet love, thy conscience bear in mind,
Remember well how long thou hast delay'd,
So that the world such sufferings may not know.
If I must reckon, and excuses find
For all things useless I to thee have said,
To a full year the Judgment Day will grow
1807Ä8.
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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 Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours,
against a tree, and on the immediate verge of the steep bank
descending to the stream. Chance had taken a sure aim with
the stone. Then came a clang of broken glass; night fell
upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing announced the
bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional
collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had
dislodged in its descent, rattled behind it into the
profundities of the glen; and then silence, like night,
resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing to its
utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now
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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 The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: his neighbour would cause him, and thus his favourite
occupation was changed into a constant source of misery to him.
Van Baerle, as may easily be imagined, had no sooner begun
to apply his natural ingenuity to his new fancy, than he
succeeded in growing the finest tulips. Indeed; he knew
better than any one else at Haarlem or Leyden -- the two
towns which boast the best soil and the most congenial
climate -- how to vary the colours, to modify the shape, and
to produce new species.
He belonged to that natural, humorous school who took for
their motto in the seventeenth century the aphorism uttered
The Black Tulip |
