| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: Her mother's fillet with fringes of pearls;
Quickly she turned with a child's caprice
And pressed on the mirror a swift, glad kiss.
Queen Gulnaar laughed like a tremulous rose:
"Here is my rival, O King Feroz."
THE POET TO DEATH
Tarry a while, O Death, I cannot die
While yet my sweet life burgeons with its spring;
Fair is my youth, and rich the echoing boughs
Where dhadikulas sing.
Tarry a while, O Death, I cannot die
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: Amazons, the warlike women of the East, till all night they
heard the clank of anvils and the roar of furnace-blasts, and
the forge-fires shone like sparks through the darkness in the
mountain glens aloft; for they were come to the shores of the
Chalybes, the smiths who never tire, but serve Ares the cruel
War-god, forging weapons day and night.
And at day-dawn they looked eastward, and midway between the
sea and the sky they saw white snow-peaks hanging, glittering
sharp and bright above the clouds. And they knew that they
were come to Caucasus, at the end of all the earth: Caucasus
the highest of all mountains, the father of the rivers of the
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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 Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: But another and stronger force was exerting itself in
the girl's favor. However low a man may sink, honor
and chivalry, has he ever possessed them, are never
entirely eradicated from his character, and though
Albert Werper had long since ceased to evidence the
slightest claim to either the one or the other, the
spontaneous acknowledgment of them which the girl's
speech had presumed had reawakened them both within
him.
For the first time he realized the almost hopeless and
frightful position of the fair captive, and the depths
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar |
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 Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: let me know. For his sake and for your own, I would not be a
useless friend: I know, you know me a most warm one; please
command me or my wife, in any way. Do not trouble to write to me;
Austin, I have no doubt, will do so, if you are, as I fear you will
be, unfit.
My heart is sore for you. At least you know what you have been to
him; how he cherished and admired you; how he was never so pleased
as when he spoke of you; with what a boy's love, up to the last, he
loved you. This surely is a consolation. Yours is the cruel part
- to survive; you must try and not grudge to him his better
fortune, to go first. It is the sad part of such relations that
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