| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: by the way, I must go to the Maire for the passport.' He put on his
hat, took two or three steps towards the door, paused, and took the
crucifix. His wife was trembling with joy.
" 'He will go to Duvivier's,' thought she.
"As soon as he had left, Madame de Merret rang for Rosalie, and then
in a terrible voice she cried: 'The pick! Bring the pick! and set to
work. I saw how Gorenflot did it yesterday; we shall have time to make
a gap and build it up again.'
"In an instant Rosalie had brought her mistress a sort of cleaver;
she, with a vehemence of which no words can give an idea, set to work
to demolish the wall. She had already got out a few bricks, when,
La Grande Breteche |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience
and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction
comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse.
With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought
that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life
in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal
of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the private experience
of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New,
and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir--with
a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict
than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable,
Middlemarch |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: harmony between them.
Well--there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor
his, but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own
moral contempt for it and physical dependence on it, of his
half-talents and her half-principles, of the something in them
both that was not stout enough to resist nor yet pliant enough
to yield. She stared at the fact on the journey back to
Versailles, and all that sleepless night in her room; and the
next morning, when the housemaid came in with her breakfast
tray, she felt the factitious energy that comes from having
decided, however half-heartedly, on a definite course.
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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 In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: made coco-brandy, he has been driven from his house into the woods.
'A mouse that dwelt in a cat's ear' had a more easy resting-place;
and yet I have never seen a man that bore less mark of years. He
must show us the church, still decorated with the bishop's artless
ornaments of paper - the last work of industrious old hands, and
the last earthly amusement of a man that was much of a hero. In
the sacristy we must see his sacred vessels, and, in particular, a
vestment which was a 'VRAIE CURIOSITE,' because it had been given
by a gendarme. To the Protestant there is always something
embarrassing in the eagerness with which grown and holy men regard
these trifles; but it was touching and pretty to see Orens, his
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