| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: countenance red enough to begin with, and further flushed by the bake-
house fire, was suddenly blanched; such terror perturbed him that he
reeled as he walked, and stared about him like a drunken man.
"Miserable aristocrat! Do you want to have our heads cut off?" he
shouted furiously. "You just take to your heels and never show
yourself here again. Don't come to me for materials for your plots."
He tried, as he spoke, to take away the little box which she had
slipped into one of her pockets. But at the touch of a profane hand on
her clothes, the stranger recovered youth and activity for a moment,
preferring to face the dangers of the street with no protector save
God, to the loss of the thing she had just paid for. She sprang to the
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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 Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the back of
Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again, after
the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love
before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains
of the famous Trauermarsch.
*"We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the
word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness; and
this fear is generated only when love begins to wane. How came it
that this loves the highest blessedness to all things living, was
so far lost sight of by the human race that at last it came to
this: all that mankind did, ordered, and established, was
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