| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: Going I know not where,
Dead leaves upon the stream
And dead leaves on the air.
Vox Corporis
The beast to the beast is calling,
And the soul bends down to wait;
Like the stealthy lord of the jungle,
The white man calls his mate.
The beast to the beast is calling,
They rush through the twilight sweet,
But the soul is a wary hunter,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: threads radiate at equal intervals from a central point. Over this
framework runs a continuous spiral thread, forming chords, or
crossbars, from the centre to the circumference. It is
magnificently large and magnificently symmetrical.
In the lower part of the web, starting from the centre, a wide
opaque ribbon descends zigzag-wise across the radii. This is the
Epeira's trade-mark, the flourish of an artist initialling his
creation. 'Fecit So-and-so,' she seems to say, when giving the
last throw of the shuttle to her handiwork.
That the Spider feels satisfied when, after passing and repassing
from spoke to spoke, she finishes her spiral, is beyond a doubt:
The Life of the Spider |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in any attitude, a
beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom that she
had known more kinds of trouble than one.
He had a great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but
occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday
afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories.
There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by
side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of
these winter afternoons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware after
he had seated himself that the lady he had so often seen at church
was in the place next him and was evidently alone, as he also this
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: That was the Constitution of 1848, which on, the 2d of December, 1851,
was not overthrown by one head, but tumbled down at the touch of a mere
hat; though, true enough, that hat was a three-cornered Napoleon hat.
While the bourgeois' republicans were engaged in the Assembly with the
work of splicing this Constitution, of discussing and voting, Cavaignac,
on the outside, maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of
siege of Paris was the midwife of the constitutional assembly, during
its republican pains of travail. When the Constitution is later on
swept off the earth by the bayonet,
it should not be forgotten that it was by the bayonet, likewise--and the
bayonet turned against the people, at that--that it had to be protected
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