| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: have given him the sacrament without confession."
"You are not a child, /morbleu/!" cried the duke, "and we'll treat you
as a man."
"The heretics have attempted to beguile your august mother," said the
cardinal, addressing the king, and trying to draw him apart to win him
over to their ends.
"Alas!" said the queen-mother to her son, assuming a reproachful look
and stopping the king at the moment when the cardinal was leading him
into the oratory to subject him to his dangerous eloquence, "you see
the result of the situation in which I am; they think me irritated by
the little influence that I have in public affairs,--I, the mother of
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: the feeling of one who has crossed a street, and has been all but run
over by a passing 'Hansom.'
"--and I think he has too lonely a life," she went on, with a gentle
earnestness that left no room whatever to suspect a double meaning.
"Do get him to come! And don't forget the day, Tuesday week. We can
drive you over. It would be a pity to go by rail--- there is so much
pretty scenery on the road. And our open carriage just holds four."
"Oh, I'll persuade him to come!" I said with confidence--thinking
"it would take all my powers of persuasion to keep him away!"
The picnic was to take place in ten days: and though Arthur readily
accepted the invitation I brought him, nothing that I could say would
Sylvie and Bruno |
