| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like the character of
1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to an
unbearably contradictory extreme. The "play of constitutional powers,"
as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the
executive powers, plays permanent "vabanque" in the Constitution of
1848. On the one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and
qualified for re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last
instance over war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the
power to grant amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: or that of any one person; but mentioned it as a report generally
diffused.
The story ran through the town like fire among girdled trees, and
became so much the universal talk that nobody could tell whence
it had originated. Mr. Higginbotham was as well known at Parker's
Falls as any citizen of the place, being part owner of the
slitting mill, and a considerable stockholder in the cotton
factories. The inhabitants felt their own prosperity interested
in his fate. Such was the excitement, that the Parker's Falls
Gazette anticipated its regular day of publication, and came out
with half a form of blank paper and a column of double pica
Twice Told Tales |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: in a nerveless scrawl: "Send a hundred dollars by this man. I am in
a frightful fix."
Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage
of opium, and something in this message stirred his facile
indignation. Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the
whole they had seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was
astonished that while he was sitting and talking of the great world-
republic of the future and the secret self-directed aristocracy that
would make it possible, his own friend, his chosen companion, should
thus, by this inglorious request and this ungainly messenger,
disavow him. He felt a wave of intense irritation.
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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 Exiles by Honore de Balzac: entered in.
" 'Do you see her? She is sad in her bliss; she is parted from me!
Paradise must be a desert to her.'
" 'Master,' said I with tears, for I thought of my love, 'when this
one shall desire Paradise for God's sake alone, shall he not be
delivered?' And the Father of Poets mildly bowed his head in sign of
assent.
"We departed, cleaving the air, and making no more noise than the
birds that pass overhead sometimes when we lie in the shade of a tree.
It would have been vain to try to check the hapless shade in his
blasphemy. It is one of the griefs of the angels of darkness that they
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