| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: gallop to the Hague.
Chapter 8
An Invasion
The incident just related was, as the reader has guessed
before this, the diabolical work of Mynheer Isaac Boxtel.
It will be remembered that, with the help of his telescope,
not even the least detail of the private meeting between
Cornelius de Witt and Van Baerle had escaped him. He had,
indeed, heard nothing, but he had seen everything, and had
rightly concluded that the papers intrusted by the Warden to
the Doctor must have been of great importance, as he saw Van
The Black Tulip |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: interested in what, behind his back, she called "Mr. Wressley's
Wajahs"; for she lisped very prettily. She did not understand one
little thing about them, but she acted as if she did. Men have
married on that sort of error before now.
Providence, however, had care of Wressley. He was immensely struck
with Miss Venner's intelligence. He would have been more impressed
had he heard her private and confidential accounts of his calls. He
held peculiar notions as to the wooing of girls. He said that the
best work of a man's career should be laid reverently at their feet.
Ruskin writes something like this somewhere, I think; but in
ordinary life a few kisses are better and save time.
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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 Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: "I!" said a woman with white hair and an aged parchment face, in which
two gray eyes glittered.
"Ah! grandmother, you have come too late," cried the poor child,
bursting into tears.
Pierrette fell upon her bed, her strength all gone, half-dead with the
exhaustion which, in her feeble state, followed so violent a struggle.
The tall gray woman took her in her arms, as a nurse lifts a child,
and went out, followed by Brigaut, without a word to Sylvie, on whom
she cast one glance of majestic accusation.
The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume,
shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth),
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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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Be true! Be natural! Show yourselves as you are!"--even such a
virtuous and sincere ass would learn in a short time to have
recourse to the FURCA of Horace, NATURAM EXPELLERE : with what
results? "Plebeianism" USQUE RECURRET . [FOOTNOTE: Horace's
"Epistles," I. x. 24.]
265. At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I submit that
egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul, I mean the
unalterable belief that to a being such as "we," other beings
must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice
themselves. The noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without
question, and also without consciousness of harshness,
Beyond Good and Evil |
