| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: and nearly carried me into the house.
'Ellen, I was ready to tear my hair off my head! I sobbed and wept
so that my eyes were almost blind; and the ruffian you have such
sympathy with stood opposite: presuming every now and then to bid
me "wisht," and denying that it was his fault; and, finally,
frightened by my assertions that I would tell papa, and that he
should be put in prison and hanged, he commenced blubbering
himself, and hurried out to hide his cowardly agitation. Still, I
was not rid of him: when at length they compelled me to depart,
and I had got some hundred yards off the premises, he suddenly
issued from the shadow of the road-side, and checked Minny and took
Wuthering Heights |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: but they love them; they love them so well that they forget dukes,
marshals, rivalries, financiers, follies, luxuries, their paste jewels
and their real diamonds, their heeled slippers and their rouge,--all,
for the sweetness of country life.
I have gathered, my dear fellow, much precious information about the
old age of Mademoiselle Laguerre; for, to tell you the truth, the
after life of such women as Florine, Mariette, Suzanne de Val Noble,
and Tullia has made me, every now and then, extremely inquisitive, as
though I were a child inquiring what had become of the old moons.
In 1790 Mademoiselle Laguerre, alarmed at the turn of public affairs,
came to settle at Les Aigues, bought and given to her by Bouret, who
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Though I could never like the kind that likes to live alone;
And when you met, you found his eyes were always on your shoes,
As if they did the talking when he asked you for the news.
"That's all, my son. Were I to talk for half a hundred years
I'd never clear away from there the cloud that never clears.
We buried what was left of it, -- the bar, too, and the chains;
And only for the apple tree there's nothing that remains."
Forty years ago it was I heard the old man say,
"That's all, my son." -- And here again I find the place to-day,
Deserted and told only by the tree that knows the most,
And overgrown with golden-rod as if there were no ghost.
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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 The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its
extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude,
and from servitude to anarchy.
However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of
revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their
psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that
deceives us on this point. Their rebellious and destructive
outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much
governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in
consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely
conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of
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