| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: you have not yet made him equally sanguine."
"No.--He thinks Marianne's affection too deeply
rooted for any change in it under a great length of time,
and even supposing her heart again free, is too diffident
of himself to believe, that with such a difference of age
and disposition he could ever attach her. There, however,
he is quite mistaken. His age is only so much beyond
hers as to be an advantage, as to make his character and
principles fixed;--and his disposition, I am well convinced,
is exactly the very one to make your sister happy.
And his person, his manners too, are all in his favour.
Sense and Sensibility |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: a dissipated life, he tried to deaden feeling by hard study, and began
a great book on Law.
But he was not allowed to enjoy the monastic peace he had hoped for.
When the celestial Angelique saw him desert worldly society to work at
home with such regularity, she tried to convert him. It had been a
real sorrow to her to know that her husband's opinions were not
strictly Christian; and she sometimes wept as she reflected that if
her husband should die it would be in a state of final impenitence, so
that she could not hope to snatch him from the eternal fires of Hell.
Thus Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments,
the narrow views by which his wife--fancying she had achieved the
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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 Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: which is a delicious street where everyone promenades, where there is
always a breeze, shade, sun, rain, and love. Ha! ha! laugh away, but
go there. It is a street always new, always royal, always imperial--a
patriotic street, a street with two paths, a street open at both ends,
a wide street, a street so large that no one has ever cried, "Out of
the way!" there. A street which does not wear out, a street which
leads to the abbey of Grand-mont, and to a trench, which works very
well with the bridge, and at the end of which is a finer fair ground.
A street well paved, well built, well washed, as clean as a glass,
populous, silent at certain times, a coquette with a sweet nightcap on
its pretty blue tiles--to be short, it is the street where I was born;
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
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 Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: advocate, should understated your letter to have been penned in a
house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and the
comments of the passers-by. I think (to employ a phrase of yours
which I admire) it "should be attributed" to you that you have
never visited the scene of Damien's life and death. If you had,
and had recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even
your pen perhaps would have been stayed.
Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine)
has not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom. When
calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
and took root in the Eight Islands, a QUID PRO QUO was to be looked
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