| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: like case, can fully understand its mute ecstasies and its vagaries,
matter to set those people who are lucky enough to see life only in
its matter-of-fact aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful
hesitation, Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter,
which may serve as a sample of the epistolary style peculiar to
lovers, a performance which, like the drawings prepared with great
secrecy by children for the birthdays of father or mother, is found
insufferable by every mortal except the recipients:--
"MADAME,--Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, is so great
that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. Do not throw this
letter into the fire; be so kind as to read it through. Perhaps
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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 Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: judge if your faces must not have been familiar to us."
So the voyagers examined the web of cloth which the beautiful
woman had been weaving in her loom; and, to their vast
astonishment, they saw their own figures perfectly represented
in different colored threads. It was a life-like picture of
their recent adventures, showing them in the cave of
Polyphemus, and how they had put out his one great moony eye;
while in another part of the tapestry they were untying the
leathern bags, puffed out with contrary winds; and farther on,
they beheld themselves scampering away from the gigantic king
of the Laestrygons, who had caught one of them by the leg.
Tanglewood Tales |
