Living in Elemental Harmony

From Seal Morning (1957), by Rowena Farre.

He went on to say that according to old Celtic occult lore we belong in the morning of our lives, or childhood, to the sea; in the afternoon, or maturity, to the land; and in the evening, or old age, to the air. Only after death do we mingle with and belong to all three elements. Then Time is undifferentiated, like a great wave which never breaks, like a wind blowing strong and free forever, like a vast range of hills unbroken by any plain. In this eternal time our strength does not ebb or flow and no moment is more propitious than another.

The Apostles of Freedom

From The Vision of Asia (1933), by L. Cranmer-Byng.

Poets are essentially the apostles of freedom, but the freedom of which they dream is the freedom of ordered sequence and adjustment into the coherent and sustained harmonies. A fortuitous combination of chords and discords, of melodies that have no relation to each other, is not freedom but the anarchy of contending forces. And all the harmonies are combined and contained in the greater rhythm of life. There are harmonies of type both human and sub-human, and the rarer harmony of which Shakespere speaks:

‘There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed Cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls. …”