| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan: splenetic, all in good time. However, I suppose you are surprised
that I am not more sorrowful at parting with so many near relations;
to be sure, 'tis very affecting; but you see they never move a muscle,
so why should I?
ROWLEY. There's no making you serious a moment.
CHARLES. Yes, faith, I am so now. Here, my honest Rowley, here,
get me this changed directly, and take a hundred pounds of it
immediately to old Stanley.
ROWLEY. A hundred pounds! Consider only----
CHARLES. Gad's life, don't talk about it! poor Stanley's wants
are pressing, and, if you don't make haste, we shall have some one
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: pupil, but to the great intellectual power which the sometime street-
boy fully recognized.
Before long Cerizet began to fraternize with the Cointets' workpeople,
drawn to them by the mutual attraction of blouse and jacket, and the
class feeling, which is, perhaps, strongest of all in the lowest ranks
of society. In their company Cerizet forgot the little good doctrine
which David had managed to instil into him; but, nevertheless, when
the others joked the boy about the presses in his workshop ("old
sabots," as the "bears" contemptuously called them), and showed him
the magnificent machines, twelve in number, now at work in the
Cointets' great printing office, where the single wooden press was
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that
would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak
the wrong word; that would make everything ugly. He wanted the
knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own
august weight. If she was to forsake him it was surely for her to
take leave. This was why he didn't directly ask her again what she
knew; but it was also why, approaching the matter from another
side, he said to her in the course of his visit: "What do you
regard as the very worst that at this time of day CAN happen to
me?"
He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with 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 Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: are wisest. They are the magi.
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.
The Gift of the Magi |
