| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: Nor urg'd the labors of my lord in vain,
A sinking empire longer to sustain,
Tho'much I ow'd to Priam's house, and more
The dangers of Aeneas did deplore.
But now, by Jove's command, and fate's decree,
His race is doom'd to reign in Italy:
With humble suit I beg thy needful art,
O still propitious pow'r, that rules my heart!
A mother kneels a suppliant for her son.
By Thetis and Aurora thou wert won
To forge impenetrable shields, and grace
Aeneid |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: dug many a year too soon. The doctor had an everlasting pipe in
his mouth, and, as somebody said, in allusion to his habit of
swearing, it was always alight with hell-fire.
These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand
each after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of
the contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they
averred, he would find something far better worth seeking than
the Unpardonable Sin. No mind, which has wrought itself by
intense and solitary meditation into a high state of enthusiasm,
can endure the kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of
thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now subjected. It
The Snow Image |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: of earth, like a parapet, makes a place of shelter from the common
winds, where a man may sit in quiet and see the tide and the mad
billows contending at his feet. As he might look down from the
window of a house upon some street disturbance, so, from this post,
he looks down upon the tumbling of the Merry Men. On such a night,
of course, he peers upon a world of blackness, where the waters
wheel and boil, where the waves joust together with the noise of an
explosion, and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an
eye. Never before had I seen the Merry Men thus violent. The
fury, height, and transiency of their spoutings was a thing to be
seen and not recounted. High over our heads on the cliff rose
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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 First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular
opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.
Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.
Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement,
is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle,
anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.
I do not forget the position, assumed by some, that Constitutional
questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny
that such decisions must be binding, in any case, upon the parties
to a suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled
to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other
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