| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: been a great lady she would have fainted; but as she was only a
procurator's wife, she contented herself saying to the Musketeer
with concentrated fury, "Eh, Monsieur Porthos, you don't offer me
any holy water?"
Porthos, at the sound of that voice, started like a man awakened
from a sleep of a hundred years.
"Ma-madame!" cried he; "is that you? How is your husband, our
dear Monsieur Coquenard? Is he still as stingy as ever? Where
can my eyes have been not to have seen you during the two hours
of the sermon?"
"I was within two paces of you, monsieur," replied the
The Three Musketeers |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: know, mademoiselle, that in 1814 Cardon the banker, owner of the
pulping troughs of Bruges and Langlee (where Leorier de l'Isle
endeavored in 1776 to solve the very problem that occupied your
father), Cardon brought an action against one Proust for an error in
weights of two millions in a total of ten million pounds' weight of
rags, worth about four million francs! The manufacturer washes the
rags and reduces them to a thin pulp, which is strained, exactly as a
cook strains sauce through a tamis, through an iron frame with a fine
wire bottom where the mark which give its name to the size of the
paper is woven. The size of this mould, as it is called, regulates the
size of the sheet.
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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 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: to undergo. But seeing Phutatorius stop short, without any attempt or
desire to go on--a third party began to suppose, that it was no more than
an involuntary respiration, casually forming itself into the shape of a
twelve-penny oath--without the sin or substance of one.
Others, and especially one or two who sat next him, looked upon it on the
contrary as a real and substantial oath, propensly formed against Yorick,
to whom he was known to bear no good liking--which said oath, as my father
philosophized upon it, actually lay fretting and fuming at that very time
in the upper regions of Phutatorius's purtenance; and so was naturally, and
according to the due course of things, first squeezed out by the sudden
influx of blood which was driven into the right ventricle of Phutatorius's
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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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: have his son reprimanded by a slave, or pulled, it may be, by the
ears when found tardy in his lesson: nor would he have him owe to a
servant the obligation of so great a thing as his learning; he
himself, therefore, (as we were saying,) taught him his grammar, law,
and his gymnastic exercises. Nor did he only show him, too, how to
throw a dart, to fight in armor, and to ride, but to box also and to
endure both heat and cold, and to swim over the most rapid and rough
rivers. He says, likewise, that he wrote histories, in large
characters, with his own hand, that so his son, without stirring out
of the house, might learn to know about his countrymen and
forefathers: nor did he less abstain from speaking anything obscene
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