(10) In this manner you must understand the four Elements, which yet are not four divided Things, or Essences, but one only Essence: And yet there are four Differences, or Distinctions in this Birth; and each Element lies in the other, as in a Chest, and it is its Receptacle, also it is a Member therein. Understand and consider the Ground aright, which follows. The P Sourness is the Matrix, and a Cause of all Things, which in its own Substance is very dark, cold, and as nothing; but the Eternal Deity being there, and speculating or beholding itself in the Sourness, therefore the dark Sourness is desirous after the divine Virtue, and attracts; although there is no Life or Understanding in the Sourness, yet it is the Ground of the first Essence, and the Original whence something comes to be: Here we can search no further into the Ground of the Deity, for it troubles [disturbs, or confounds] us.

(12) And here is nothing but the Kiss of Love, and Wooing, and here the Bridegroom embraces his beloved Bride, and is no otherwise than when the pleasing Life is born or generated in the sour, tart, or harsh Death; and the Birth of Life is thus in Bitterness in the Essence of the harsh astringent Tartness of the Water-Spirit, the Birth attains the sixth form, viz. the Sound or Noise of the Motion. And this sixth a Form is rightly called Mercurius; for it takes its Form, Virtue, and Beginning, in the aching or anxious Harshness, by the Raging, of the Bitterness; for the Rising it takes the Virtue of its Mother (that is, the Essence of the sweet Harshness) along with it, and brings it into the Fire-Flash, from whence the Light kindles. And here the Trial [or Experience] begins, one Virtue beholding the other in the Fire-Flash, one [Virtue] feels the other by the Rising up, by the Stirring they one hear another, in the Essence they one taste another, and by the pleasant, lovely [Source, Spring, or] Fountain, they one smell another, from whence the Sweetness of the Light springs up out of the Essence of the sweet and harsh Spirit, which from henceforth is the Water-Spirit. And out of these six Forms, now in the Birth, or Generating, comes a six-fold self-subsisting Essence, which is inseparable; where they one continually generate another, and the one is not without the other, nor can be, and without this Birth or Substance there could be nothing; for the six Forms have each of them now the Essences of all their sixfold Virtue in it, and it is as it were the only one Thing, and no more; only each Form has its own Condition.