| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs: it. I was anxious to look with my own eyes upon the famous
bridge, and I guessed, too, that the river would lead me
into the part of London where stood Westminster Abbey and
the Tower.
Realizing that the section through which we had been passing
was doubtless outlying, and therefore not so built up with
large structures as the more centrally located part of the
old town, I felt sure that farther down the river I should
find the ruins larger. The bridge would be there in part,
at least, and so would remain the walls of many of the great
edifices of the past. There would be no such complete ruin
Lost Continent |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: chronicle of King Alphonsus, who reduced Toledo, That in the year 1343,
which was full thirty-seven years before that time, the secret of powder
was well known, and employed with success, both by Moors and Christians,
not only in their sea-combats, at that period, but in many of their most
memorable sieges in Spain and Barbary--And all the world knows, that Friar
Bacon had wrote expressly about it, and had generously given the world a
receipt to make it by, above a hundred and fifty years before even Schwartz
was born--And that the Chinese, added my uncle Toby, embarrass us, and all
accounts of it, still more, by boasting of the invention some hundreds of
years even before him--
They are a pack of liars, I believe, cried Trim--
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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 The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: Revolution; I had not been able to keep a steward or a man of
business. Nowadays gentlemen are for the most part obliged to manage
their affairs themselves. Most of my title-deeds had been brought to
Paris, from Languedoc, Provence, or le Comtat, by my father, who
dreaded, and not without reason, the inquisition which family title-
deeds, and what was then styled the 'parchments' of the privileged
class, brought down on the owners.
"Our name is Negrepelisse; d'Espard is a title acquired in the time of
Henri IV. by a marriage which brought us the estates and titles of the
house of d'Espard, on condition of our bearing an escutcheon of
pretence on our coat-of-arms, those of the house of d'Espard, an old
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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 Message by Honore de Balzac: What an awful piece of news it was for a woman whose whole
thoughts were full of her young lover, who was looking forward
hour by hour to a joy which no words can express, a woman who had
been at a world of pains to invent plausible pretexts to draw him
to her side. Yet, after all, it was a cruel deed of charity to be
the messenger of death! So I hurried on, splashing and bemiring
myself in the byways of the Bourbonnais.
Before very long I reached a great chestnut avenue with a pile of
buildings at the further end--the Chateau of Montpersan stood out
against the sky like a mass of brown cloud, with sharp, fantastic
outlines. All the doors of the chateau stood open. This in itself
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