| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high -
continuously throbbed in time. In time the singers kept up their
long-drawn, lugubrious, ululating song; in time, too, the dancers,
tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and
gesticulated - their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like
butterflies. The sense of time, in all these ocean races, is
extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that almost
every sound and movement fell in one. So much the more unanimously
must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more
wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld
them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: With covetous eyes I looked again at the marbles,
The precious agates, the pee-wees, the chinies--
Then I passed on.
In the winter dusk,
The pavements were gleaming with rain;
There in the lighted window
I left my boyhood."
THE KISS
BEFORE YOU kissed me only winds of heaven
Had kissed me, and the tenderness of rain--
Now you have come, how can I care for kisses
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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 The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: another, a black and sinister polyglot population sweltered in
indescribable congestion in warrens, and excavations beyond the
power and knowledge of government. Her vice, her crime, her law
alike were inspired by a fierce and terrible energy, and like the
great cities of mediaeval Italy, her ways were dark and
adventurous with private war.
It was the peculiar shape of Manhattan Island, pressed in by arms
of the sea on either side, and incapable of comfortable
expansion, except along a narrow northward belt, that first gave
the New York architects their bias for extreme vertical
dimensions. Every need was lavishly supplied them--money,
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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 A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: And sweetens, in the suffering pangs it bears,
The aloes of all forces, shocks and fears.
'Now all these hearts that do on mine depend,
Feeling it break, with bleeding groans they pine,
And supplicant their sighs to your extend,
To leave the battery that you make 'gainst mine,
Lending soft audience to my sweet design,
And credent soul to that strong-bonded oath,
That shall prefer and undertake my troth.
'This said, his watery eyes he did dismount,
Whose sights till then were levell'd on my face;
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