| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: alone knew where it was, and then she disappeared.
"I am suffocating, my poor Brigitte," she cried, wiping the tears that
gushed from her eyes, now brilliant with fever, anxiety, and
impatience. "He does not come," she moaned, looking round the room
prepared for her son. "Here alone I can breathe, I can live! A few
minutes more and he MUST be here; for I know he is living. I am
certain of it, my heart says so. Don't you hear something, Brigitte? I
would give the rest of my life to know at this moment whether he were
still in prison, or out in the free country. Oh! I wish I could stop
thinking--"
She again examined the room to see if all were in order. A good fire
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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 Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: of," he said to himself.
Of the girl with the golden eyes, over whom at that time all the
elegant youth of Paris was mad, he hardly thought. The idea of death,
expressed in the midst of their pleasure, and the fear of which had
more than once darkened the brow of that beautiful creature, who held
to the houris of Asia by her mother, to Europe by her education, to
the tropics by her birth, seemed to him merely one of those deceptions
by which women seek to make themselves interesting.
"She is from Havana--the most Spanish region to be found in the New
World. So she preferred to feign terror rather than cast in my teeth
indisposition or difficulty, coquetry or duty, like a Parisian woman.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: have got him, but they did not try. Perhaps he was too
old and tough. But they did want the Hairless One and
my sister, for as I looked back from the trees I could
see the Fire-Men beating in their heads with rocks.
One of the Fire-Men was the wizened old hunter who
limped.
We went on through the trees toward the caves--an
excited and disorderly mob that drove before it to
their holes all the small life of the forest, and that
set the blue-jays screaming impudently. Now that there
was no immediate danger, Long-Lip waited for his
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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 Touchstone by Edith Wharton: like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten.
The instinct of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous
that man can exercise--made him awkwardly declare--"Oh, I used to
see her at people's houses, that was all;" and her silence as
usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added,
with increased indifference, "I simply can't see what you can find
to interest you in such a book."
She seemed to consider this intently. "You've read it, then?"
"I glanced at it--I never read such things."
"Is it true that she didn't wish the letters to be published?"
Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow
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