| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: without getting any results?" remarked Peyrade as he helped Corentin
into the osier vehicle.
"It isn't over yet," replied the other, "those four young men are in
the forest. Look there!" and he pointed to Laurence who was watching
them from a window. "I once revenged myself on a woman who was worth a
dozen of that one and had stirred my bile a good deal less. If this
girl comes in the way of my hatchet I'll pay her for the lash of that
whip."
"The other was a strumpet," said Peyrade; "this one has rank."
"What difference is that to me? All's fish that swims in the sea,"
replied Corentin, signing to the gendarme who drove him to whip up.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: One moment glance, where by the pillared wall
Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
Of faiths forgot and races undivined:
Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice,
Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.
As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
So far, so foreign, your divided friends
Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: called; true philosophy is an image of the truth, a divine gift bestowed
on the Greeks. The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art
and wisdom are from God. The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar
endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their
work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom,
giving them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of
sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole
intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down
from God to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on "an
inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that
concerning which the Lord Himself said: 'I am the Truth.' And when the
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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 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: after tea, when I had been busy with the farm all day.
'To take a walk,' was the reply.
'Do you always brush your hat so carefully, and do your hair so
nicely, and put on such smart new gloves when you take a walk?'
'Not always.'
'You're going to Wildfell Hall, aren't you?'
'What makes you think so?'
'Because you look as if you were - but I wish you wouldn't go so
often.'
'Nonsense, child! I don't go once in six weeks - what do you
mean?'
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
