| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: Though yet he never harm'd me, here I quit him:
He knows himself my bed he hath defil'd;
And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick;
So there's my riddle:--One that's dead is quick;
And now behold the meaning.
[Re-enter Widow with HELENA.]
KING.
Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is't real that I see?
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: down to routine of toil, who wrote magazine articles instead of
reading them hurriedly in the pauses of office-work, who painted
pictures instead of contenting themselves with cheap etchings
picked up at another man's sale of effects. Mine were all the
rights of social intercourse, craft by craft, that India,
stony-hearted step-mother of collectors, has swindled us out of.
Treading soft carpets and breathing the incense of superior
cigars, I wandered from room to room studying the paintings in
which the members of the club had caricatured themselves, their
associates, and their aims. There was a slick French audacity
about the workmanship of these men of toil unbending that went
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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 Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: resemblance to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of
that period; his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray
before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where
religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of
the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the
black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a
hollow face, the rigidity of the wrinkles, the disdain expressed in
the lower lip, were all expressive of ambition, despotism, and power,
the more to be feared because the narrowness of the skull betrayed an
almost total absence of intelligence, and a mere brute courage devoid
of generosity. The face was horribly disfigured by a large transversal
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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 Cratylus by Plato: letter kappa being inserted for the sake of euphony. This is a great
mystery which has been confided to me; but when I ask for an explanation I
am thought obtrusive, and another derivation is proposed to me. Justice is
said to be o kaion, or the sun; and when I joyfully repeat this beautiful
notion, I am answered, 'What, is there no justice when the sun is down?'
And when I entreat my questioner to tell me his own opinion, he replies,
that justice is fire in the abstract, or heat in the abstract; which is not
very intelligible. Others laugh at such notions, and say with Anaxagoras,
that justice is the ordering mind. 'I think that some one must have told
you this.' And not the rest? Let me proceed then, in the hope of proving
to you my originality. Andreia is quasi anpeia quasi e ano roe, the stream
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