| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: classes, the love of a girl of the people transferred to a
loftier level. Bourgeat did all my errands, woke me at night at
any fixed hour, trimmed my lamp, cleaned our landing; as good as
a servant as he was as a father, and as clean as an English girl.
He did all the housework. Like Philopoemen, he sawed our wood,
and gave to all he did the grace of simplicity while preserving
his dignity, for he seemed to understand that the end ennobles
every act.
"When I left this good fellow, to be house surgeon at the Hotel-
Dieu, I felt an indescribable, dull pain, knowing that he could
no longer live with me; but he comforted himself with the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: water widening away to melt into blue of air. Horizon there is none: only
distance soaring into space,-- infinite concavity hollowing before you, and
hugely arching above you,-- the color deepening with the height. But far in
the midway-blue there hangs a faint, faint vision of palace towers, with
high roofs horned and curved like moons,-- some shadowing of splendor
strange and old, illumined by a sunshine soft as memory.
...What I have thus been trying to describe is a kakemono,-- that is to
say, a Japanese painting on silk, suspended to the wall of my alcove;-- and
the name of it is Shinkiro, which signifies "Mirage." But the shapes of the
mirage are unmistakable. Those are the glimmering portals of Horai the
blest; and those are the moony roofs of the Palace of the Dragon-King;--
Kwaidan |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: like a piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations
the sun poured its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as
solid on the swift surface of the stream as on the stable meadows.
The light sparkled golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought
the hills into communion with our eyes. And all the while the
river never stopped running or took breath; and the reeds along the
whole valley stood shivering from top to toe.
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded
on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature
more striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of
terror; and to see such a number of terrified creatures taking
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had
endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how
he had figured to her. "What, exactly, was the account I gave--?"
"Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you
had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you,
the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly
prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you,
that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of,
and that would perhaps overwhelm you."
"Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked.
She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you
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