I had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind
the personifications, and yet the personifications were themselves living
and vivid. The minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had
doubtless form, and those images themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored
in a living substance whose form is but change of form. From tradition and
perception, one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth, the
place of heterogeneous things, the images as mirrored in water and the
images themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there
was, I felt confident, certain aims and governing loves, the fire that
makes all simple. Yet the images themselves were fourfold, and one judged
their meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four
elements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a
bird born out of the fire.