Literary Traditions: From Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596)

To thousand sorts of change we subject see:
Yet are they chang’d (by other wondrous slights)
Into themselves, and lose their native mights:
The fire to aire, and th’ ayre to water sheere,
And water into earth: yet water fights
With fire, and aire with earth, approaching neere:
Yet all are in one body, and as one appeare.