| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder,
its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands
threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages,
asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade
of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points.
And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing
this-worldly about it--nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.
Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does,
ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's
warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway
you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of
penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a
power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never
detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through
them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I
watched, just as the dervish in the /Arabian Nights/ could pass into
any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.
If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven
o'clock and midnight on their way home from the Ambigu Comique, I used
to amuse myself by following them from the Boulevard du Pont aux Choux
to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The good folk would begin by talking
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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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: dialectic philosophy of Plato himself. And these Neoplatonists were
all, more or less, believers in magic--Theurgy, as it was called--in
the power of charms and spells, in the occult virtues of herbs and
gems, in the power of adepts to evoke and command spirits, in the
significance of dreams, in the influence of the stars upon men's
characters and destinies. If the great and wise philosopher
Iamblicus believed such things, why might not the men of the
sixteenth century?
And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what were called the
Occult sciences. It had always been haunting the European
imagination. Mediaeval monks had long ago transformed the poet
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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 Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And what calm
sleep would be his that very night, which was to have been spent
so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith!
Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown
heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it advisable
to conceal himself within the verge of the forest, conscious of
the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so
happily turned from it.
On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave
old voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled
sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the
Mosses From An Old Manse |
