| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: O wind, that sings so loud a song!
O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
XXVI
Keepsake Mill
Over the borders, a sin without pardon,
Breaking the branches and crawling below,
A Child's Garden of Verses |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: honorable likeness. His tall figure was slightly bent,--either because
his labors, whatever they were, obliged him to stoop, or that the
spinal column was curved by the weight of his head. He had a broad
chest and square shoulders, but the lower parts of his body were lank
and wasted, though nervous; and this discrepancy in a physical
organization evidently once perfect puzzled the mind which endeavored
to explain this anomalous figure by some possible singularities of the
man's life.
His thick blond hair, ill cared-for, fell over his shoulders in the
Dutch fashion, and its very disorder was in keeping with the general
eccentricity of his person. His broad brow showed certain
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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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: And if I die no soul will pity me,
adds, with a grin,
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity for myself?
Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read
De Profundis: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away from the
wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But we were
throwing away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis indeed: Wilde
was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an effect; but none
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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 Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: being loved by them. For the attainment of this end I know of
three lines of action in which I perpetually exercise myself, in
which one can never exercise oneself enough and which are specially
necessary to you now.
First, in order to be able to love people and to be loved by
them, one must accustom oneself to expect as little as possible
from them, and that is very hard work; for if I expect much, and
am often disappointed, I am inclined rather to reproach them than
to love them.
Second, in order to love people not in words, but in deed, one
must train oneself to do what benefits them. That needs still
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