| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: for the health recovered there under the linden-trees?
In the spring of one of the brightest years of the Restoration, a lady
with her housekeeper and her two children (the oldest a boy thirteen
years old, the youngest apparently about eight) came to Tours to look
for a house. She saw La Grenadiere and took it. Perhaps the distance
from the town was an inducement to live there.
She made a bedroom of the drawing-room, gave the children the two
rooms above, and the housekeeper slept in a closet behind the kitchen.
The dining-room was sitting-room and drawing-room all in one for the
little family. The house was furnished very simply but tastefully;
there was nothing superfluous in it, and no trace of luxury. 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 Bucolics by Virgil: "Begin, my flute, with me Maenalian lays.
Now know I what Love is: 'mid savage rocks
Tmaros or Rhodope brought forth the boy,
Or Garamantes in earth's utmost bounds-
No kin of ours, nor of our blood begot.
"Begin, my flute, with me Maenalian lays.
Fierce Love it was once steeled a mother's heart
With her own offspring's blood her hands to imbrue:
Mother, thou too wert cruel; say wert thou
More cruel, mother, or more ruthless he?
Ruthless the boy, thou, mother, cruel too.
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