| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: The heart asks more than life can give,
When that is learned, then all is learned;
The waves break fold on jewelled fold,
But beauty itself is fugitive,
It will not hurt me when I am old.
Morning Song
A diamond of a morning
Waked me an hour too soon;
Dawn had taken in the stars
And left the faint white moon.
O white moon, you are lonely,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: was because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a
not very widely known book of mine, /The World Set Free/
(May, 1914), in which I represented a world state as arising out
of Armageddon, I made the first world conference meet at Brissago
in Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the King of
Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr. Lubin I did so very
gladly. We lunched together in a pretty little room high over
Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.
He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made
to look like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that
compelling quality of intense intellectual excitement which was
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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 House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: 'Ask him if the one he hurt is there,
And if she loves him still!'
'He tells you she is there, and loves him still,--
Not as she did, but as all spirits love . . .
A cloud of spirits has gathered about him.
They praise him and call him, they do him honor;
He is more beautiful, he shines upon them.'
. . . Wind flows softly, the long deep tremulous wind,
Over the low roofs white with snow . . .
Wind flows, bearing dreams; they gather and vanish,
One by one they sing and flow;
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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 Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: ennobles while it lasts, but which rarely outlasts marriage. A
man of such uncongenial mould will love an enchanting woman
with a mad, absorbing passion, where self-sacrifice is so
mingled with selfishness that the two emotions seem one; he
will hungrily yearn to possess her, to call her by his own
name, to hold her in his arms, to kill any one else who claims
her. But when she is once his wife, and his arms hold a body
without a soul,--no soul at least for him,--then her image is
almost inevitably profaned, and the passion which began too
high for earth ends far too low for heaven. Let now death
change that form to marble, and instantly it resumes its virgin
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