| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: with my feet; and then there would have been no fire."
"Ivan," said the old man, "death is fast approaching me, and
remember that you also will have to die. Who did this dreadful
thing? Whose is the sin?"
Ivan gazed at the noble face of his dying father and was silent.
His heart was too full for utterance.
"In the presence of God," the old man continued, "whose is the
sin?"
It was only now that the truth began to dawn upon Ivan's mind,
and that he realized how foolish he had acted. He sobbed
bitterly, and fell on his knees before his father, and, crying
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: At the piano take thy seat,
Where thy friend was wont to stand!
Sweep with finger bold the string,
Then the book one moment see:
But read not! do nought but sing!
And each page thine own will be!
Ah, what grief the song imparts
With its letters, black on white,
That, when breath'd by thee, our hearts
Now can break and now delight!
1800.*
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: to find a place, full of the robust courage that shrinks from no
labor. Le Pere Grandet was at that time thinking of marriage and about
to set up his household. He espied the girl, rejected as she was from
door to door. A good judge of corporeal strength in his trade as a
cooper, he guessed the work that might be got out of a female creature
shaped like a Hercules, as firm on her feet as an oak sixty years old
on its roots, strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands
of a cartman and an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue.
Neither the warts which adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick
tints of her skin, nor the sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la
Grande Nanon, dismayed the cooper, who was at that time still of an
Eugenie Grandet |
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 Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: moreover, every individual in that family and in the neighbourhood
was utterly unknown to myself and all my acquaintances. But this
rendered it only the more piquant to me. I had now, in some
measure, got rid of the MAUVAISE HONTE that had formerly oppressed
me so much; there was a pleasing excitement in the idea of entering
these unknown regions, and making my way alone among its strange
inhabitants. I now flattered myself I was going to see something
in the world: Mr. Murray's residence was near a large town, and
not in a manufacturing district, where the people had nothing to do
but to make money; his rank from what I could gather, appeared to
be higher than that of Mr. Bloomfield; and, doubtless, he was one
Agnes Grey |
