| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: and outrun the expectations of his most admiring friends.
The subject that worked in Mr Willet's mind, and occasioned these
demonstrations, was no other than his son's bodily disfigurement,
which he had never yet got himself thoroughly to believe, or
comprehend. Shortly after their first meeting, he had been
observed to wander, in a state of great perplexity, to the kitchen,
and to direct his gaze towards the fire, as if in search of his
usual adviser in all matters of doubt and difficulty. But there
being no boiler at the Black Lion, and the rioters having so beaten
and battered his own that it was quite unfit for further service,
he wandered out again, in a perfect bog of uncertainty and mental
Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow,
And both she thinks too long with her remaining:
Short time seems long in sorrow's sharp sustaining.
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps;
And they that watch see time how slow it creeps.
Which all this time hath overslipp'd her thought,
That she with painted images hath spent;
Being from the feeling of her own grief brought
By deep surmise of others' detriment:
Losing her woes in shows of discontent.
It easeth some, though none it ever cur'd,
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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 Falk by Joseph Conrad: where the engines, stilled for ever, were decaying
slowly into a mass of rust, as the stilled heart de-
cays within the lifeless body. At first, after the
loss of the motive power, the tiller had been thor-
oughly secured by lashings. But in course of time
these had rotted, chafed, rusted, parting one by
one: and the rudder, freed, banged heavily to and
fro night and day, sending dull shocks through the
whole frame of the vessel. This was dangerous.
Nobody cared enough to lift a little finger. He
told me that even now sometimes waking up at
Falk |
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 Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: The most ignorant, it sometimes happens, will use them most. The
eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will
often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a Greek
or Latin name. The lower the calling is, and the more remote
from learning, the more pompous and erudite is its appellation.
Thus the French rope-dancers have transformed themselves into
acrobates and funambules.
In the absence of knowledge of the dead languages,
democratic nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues;
for their mutual intercourse becomes perpetual, and the
inhabitants of different countries imitate each other the more
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