| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: "As if his Excellency cares for a little toad like that!" cried the
furious Estelle.
"Come, I say, to the chateau," repeated Moreau.
Oscar dropped like an inert mass to the ground.
"Come!" cried Moreau, his anger increasing at every instant.
"No! no! mercy!" cried Oscar, who could not bring himself to submit to
a torture that seemed to him worse than death.
Moreau then took the lad by his coat, and dragged him, as he might a
dead body, through the yards, which rang with the boy's outcries and
sobs. He pulled him up the portico, and, with an arm that fury made
powerful, he flung him, bellowing, and rigid as a pole, into the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn
Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on poor little Wilkins the
novelist--who was being baited by the moralists at that time for
making one of his big women characters, not being in holy wedlock,
desire a baby and say so. . . .
The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We
do go on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living
and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding,
vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close
darknesses of these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of
Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!
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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 An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: But Mademoiselle Cormon--we must admit it--was wanting in intellect,
and did not understand the snuff-box performance. She redoubled her
vigilance against "the evil spirit"; her rigid devotion and fixed
principles kept her cruel sufferings hidden among the mysteries of
private life. Every evening, after the company had left her, she
thought of her lost youth, her faded bloom, the hopes of thwarted
nature; and, all the while immolating her passions at the feet of the
Cross (like poems condemned to stay in a desk), she resolved firmly
that if, by chance, any suitor presented himself, to subject him to no
tests, but to accept him at once for whatever he might be. She even
went so far as to think of marrying a sub-lieutenant, a man who smoked
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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 Egmont by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: Vansen. You citizens, forsooth! You live only in the present; and as you
tamely follow the trade inherited from your fathers, so you let the
government do with you just as it pleases. You make no inquiry into the
origin, the history, or the rights of a Regent; and in consequence of this
negligence, the Spaniard has drawn the net over your
ears.
Soest. Who cares for that, if one has only daily bread?
Jetter. The devil! Why did not some one come forward and tell us this in
time?
Vansen. I tell it you now. The King of Spain, whose good fortune it is to
bear sway over these provinces, has no right to govern them otherwise
Egmont |
