| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: has the meaning of betrothed.)
I SLEPT,--'twas midnight,--in my bosom woke,
As though 'twere day, my love-o'erflowing heart;
To me it seemed like night, when day first broke;
What is't to me, whate'er it may impart?
She was away; the world's unceasing strife
For her alone I suffer'd through the heat
Of sultry day; oh, what refreshing life
At cooling eve!--my guerdon was complete.
The sun now set, and wand'ring hand in hand,
His last and blissful look we greeted then;
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Adam Bede by George Eliot: began to cry and moan and rock herself as before. Seth thought,
"She will be quieter by and by, now we have been upstairs"; and he
went into the back kitchen again, to tend his little fire, hoping
that he should presently induce her to have some tea.
Lisbeth had been rocking herself in this way for more than five
minutes, giving a low moan with every forward movement of her
body, when she suddenly felt a hand placed gently on hers, and a
sweet treble voice said to her, "Dear sister, the Lord has sent me
to see if I can be a comfort to you."
Lisbeth paused, in a listening attitude, without removing her
apron from her face. The voice was strange to her. Could it be
Adam Bede |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: were much admired by people of Tours, and even by the archbishop and
clerks of St. Martin, to whom he sent as a free gift a banner fringed
with fine gold. In the neighbourhood of the said castle abounded fair
domains, wind-mills, and forests, yielding a harvest of rents of all
kinds, so that he was one of the strongest knights-banneret of the
province, and could easily have led to battle for our lord the king a
thousand men. In his old days, if by chance his bailiff, a diligent
man at hanging, brought before him a poor peasant suspected of some
offence, he would say, smiling--
"Let this one go, Brediff, he will count against those I
inconsiderately slaughtered across the seas"; oftentimes, however, he
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
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 In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's
isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon. Over
the summit, where the wind blew really chill, and whistled in the
reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of the pandanus, we
stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale and bay of
Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides. On the
fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to
seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one
practicable breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is
crowded with lovely and valuable trees, - orange, breadfruit,
mummy-apple, cocoa, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine
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