| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: Or shall we on the helmets of our foes
Tell our devotion with revengeful arms?
If for the last, say ay, and to it, lords.
WARWICK.
Why, therefore Warwick came to seek you out,
And therefore comes my brother Montague.
Attend me, lords. The proud insulting queen,
With Clifford and the haught Northumberland,
And of their feather many moe proud birds,
Have wrought the easy-melting king like wax.
He swore consent to your succession,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: after life not entirely out of place. Besides, some persons like to be
told all, and wish, as one of our cleverest critics has remarked, to
know by what chemical process oil was made to burn in Aladdin's lamp.
Jacquet, being a government employee, naturally applied to the
authorities for permission to exhume the body of Madame Jules and burn
it. He went to see the prefect of police, under whose protection the
dead sleep. That functionary demanded a petition. The blank was
brought that gives to sorrow its proper administrative form; it was
necessary to employ the bureaucratic jargon to express the wishes of a
man so crushed that words, perhaps, were lacking to him, and it was
also necessary to coldly and briefly repeat on the margin the nature
Ferragus |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: unremitting pain of years, came upon him and were crowded into the
single prayer, "Come, David, or I die!" Before the twilight faded,
while he was still kneeling, an arm came upon his shoulder, and the
faint touch of another cheek upon his own. It was hardly for the
space of a thought, but he knew the sign.
"David will come!" he said to Ruth.
From that day all was changed. The cloud of coming death which
hung over the house was transmuted into fleecy gold. All the lost
life came back to Jonathan's face, all the unrestful sweetness of
Ruth's brightened into a serene beatitude. Months had passed since
David had been heard from; they knew not how to reach him
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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 Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: companions--the beginning of an epic on the Incas:
"O Inca! O roi infortune et malheureux!"
In derision of such attempts, I was nicknamed the Poet, but mockery
did not cure me. I was always rhyming, in spite of good advice from
Monsieur Mareschal, the headmaster, who tried to cure me of an
unfortunately inveterate passion by telling me the fable of a linnet
that fell out of the nest because it tried to fly before its wings
were grown. I persisted in my reading; I became the least emulous, the
idlest, the most dreamy of all the division of "little boys," and
consequently the most frequently punished.
This autobiographical digression may give some idea of the reflections
Louis Lambert |
