| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: Nature seemed a step-mother,--feeling in her heart the same stirrings
of maternal love with which at times she gazed upon her infant.
Prepared by this train of emotion, these half involuntary meditations
(which, to use her own fine expression, winnowed her heart), to
receive the sublime instruction offered by the scene before her, she
awoke from her lethargy.
"I understood then," she said afterwards to the rector, "that our
souls must be ploughed and cultivated like the soil itself."
The vast expanse before her was lighted by a pale November sun.
Already a few gray clouds chased by a chilly wind were hurrying from
the west. It was then three o'clock. Veronique had taken more than
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: real address; nor yet at Pitman's house, some dreadful place in
Holloway, with a trapdoor in the back kitchen; a house which you
might enter in a light summer overcoat and varnished boots, to
come forth again piecemeal in a market-basket. That was the
drawback of a really efficient accomplice, Morris felt, not
without a shudder. 'I never dreamed I should come to actually
covet such society,' he thought. And then a brilliant idea struck
him. Waterloo Station, a public place, yet at certain hours of
the day a solitary; a place, besides, the very name of which must
knock upon the heart of Pitman, and at once suggest a knowledge
of the latest of his guilty secrets. Morris took a piece of paper
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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 Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known.
The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary
murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all
their details yet.
The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town.
It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council,
and water-works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people,
is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest
of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk
are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them.
The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now,
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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 Anabasis by Xenophon: in Corinth. He died in 354 B.C.
The Anabasis is his story of the march to Persia
to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and
take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing
return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a
leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
March 399 B.C.
PREPARER'S NOTE
This was typed from Dakyns' series, "The Works of Xenophon," a
four-volume set. The complete list of Xenophon's works (though
there is doubt about some of these) is:
Anabasis |
