| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: yellow and blue stripes down them, and golden buckles on their
shoes; and princes with jeweled crowns upon their heads, wearing
ermine robes and satin doublets; and funny clowns in ruffled gowns,
with round red spots upon their cheeks and tall, pointed caps.
And, strangest of all, these people were all made of china, even to
their clothes, and were so small that the tallest of them was no
higher than Dorothy's knee.
No one did so much as look at the travelers at first, except
one little purple china dog with an extra-large head, which came
to the wall and barked at them in a tiny voice, afterwards running
away again.
The Wizard of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: different parts of Greece. For the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have
been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the
Apology. But there is no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so
many outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of
Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid
foreigners who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic
games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested
seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an
argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an
'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences,
the interpreter and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of
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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 Gambara by Honore de Balzac: trying my music, was a failure. No one understood my score for the
/Martiri/. Set Beethoven before the Italians and they are out of their
depth. No one had patience enough to wait for the effect to be
produced by the different motives given out by each instrument, which
were all at last to combine in a grand /ensemble/.
"I had built some hopes on the success of the /Martiri/, for we
votaries of the blue divinity Hope always discount results. When a man
believes himself destined to do great things, it is hard not to fancy
them achieved; the bushel always has some cracks through which the
light shines.
"My wife's family lodged in the same house, and the hope of winning
Gambara |
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 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: "'One day as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I
felt in my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the
southern mountains, and raise the Nile to an inundation. In the
hurry of my imagination I commanded rain to fall; and by comparing
the time of my command with that of the inundation, I found that
the clouds had listened to my lips.'
"'Might not some other cause,' said I, 'produce this concurrence?
The Nile does not always rise on the same day.'
"'Do not believe,' said he, with impatience, 'that such objections
could escape me. I reasoned long against my own conviction, and
laboured against truth with the utmost obstinacy. I sometimes
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