| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: as fast as Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for
monasteries, would permit. It was the first door, in my
acquaintance of her, which she had not shown an indecent haste to
enter. I summoned the place in form, though with a quaking heart.
Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and a pair of brown-robed
brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a while. I think my
sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled the heart of
poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it to the
Father Prior, But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who
attend on strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: Vanneau, went back to his whist and stayed at home. The Baroness was
at the height of happiness; her husband seemed to be returning to
domestic habits; for about a fortnight he went to his office at nine
every morning, he came in to dinner at six, and spent the evening with
his family. He twice took Adeline and Hortense to the play. The mother
and daughter paid for three thanksgiving masses, and prayed to God to
suffer them to keep the husband and father He had restored to them.
One evening Victorin Hulot, seeing his father retire for the night,
said to his mother:
"Well, we are at any rate so far happy that my father has come back to
us. My wife and I shall never regret our capital if only this lasts--"
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: entangled with the bolas, then lazoed, and dragged along the
ground till rendered insensible. At Tandeel (south of the
plata), I was told that within three months one hundred
were thus destroyed. In Chile they are generally driven up
bushes or trees, and are then either shot, or baited to death
by dogs. The dogs employed in this chase belong to a particular
breed, called Leoneros: they are weak, slight animals,
like long-legged terriers, but are born with a particular
instinct for this sport. The puma is described as being very
crafty: when pursued, it often returns on its former track,
and then suddenly making a spring on one side, waits there
The Voyage of the Beagle |
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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come this sketch
of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They
would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They
would have tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the turn,
as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else
failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were,
save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that she had been
consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get on without
it; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when, by the end of
three or four minutes more, he was able to measure it. What she
brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and supplied the
|
