| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater
place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands,
sought at great cost. Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a
whole life evolved; there all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope
descended to the soul! At this moment, the sun, sympathizing with
these thoughts of love and of the future, had cast an ardent glow upon
the savage flanks of the rock; a few wild mountain flowers were
visible; the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,--
really sombre, though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath its
scanty vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with their
velvet leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations; oh,
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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 A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: eyes.
" 'I shall have real aunts now, do you understand?' she said to us
when she came back in the winter.
"She was so delighted with her respectability, so glad to renounce her
independence, that she found means to compass her end. She flattered
the old people. She went on foot every day to sit for a couple of
hours with Mme. du Bruel the elder while that lady was ill--a
Maintenon's stratagem which amazed du Bruel. And he admired his wife
without criticism; he was so fast in the toils already that he did not
feel his bonds.
"Claudine succeeded in making him understand that only under the
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