| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: The eventful Thursday at length came. They were expected about
dark, and ere dusk fires were lit upstairs and below; the kitchen
was in perfect trim; Hannah and I were dressed, and all was in
readiness.
St. John arrived first. I had entreated him to keep quite clear of
the house till everything was arranged: and, indeed, the bare idea
of the commotion, at once sordid and trivial, going on within its
walls sufficed to scare him to estrangement. He found me in the
kitchen, watching the progress of certain cakes for tea, then
baking. Approaching the hearth, he asked, "If I was at last
satisfied with housemaid's work?" I answered by inviting him to
Jane Eyre |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: If any credence may be given to Monkish legends, books have
sometimes been preserved in this world, only to meet a desiccating
fate in the world to come. The story is probably an invention
of the enemy to throw discredit on the learning and ability
of the preaching Friars, an Order which was at constant war
with the illiterate secular Clergy. It runs thus:--"In
the year 1439, two Minorite friars who had all their lives
collected books, died. In accordance with popular belief,
they were at once conducted before the heavenly tribunal to hear
their doom, taking with them two asses laden with books.
At Heaven's gate the porter demanded, `Whence came ye?'
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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 Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: incomplete studies, he came to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to
drink of science at its highest fount. The old priest, being very fond
of his nephew, left Louis free to spend his whole little inheritance
in his three years' stay in Paris, though he lived very poorly. This
fortune consisted of but a few thousand francs.
Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris
by the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must
often have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of
mind by which artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle
recollected, and the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis
Lambert wrote to him at that time, perhaps because it was the last and
Louis Lambert |
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 Death of the Lion by Henry James: much less agitated by it than she would doubtless be were she not
for the hour inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham."
Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I
kept a loose diary of the situation, that I had made the
acquaintance of this celebrity and that she was a pretty little
girl who wore her hair in what used to be called a crop. She
looked so juvenile and so innocent that if, as Mr. Morrow had
announced, she was resigned to the larger latitude, her superiority
to prejudice must have come to her early. I spent most of the day
hovering about Neil Paraday's room, but it was communicated to me
from below that Guy Walsingham, at Prestidge, was a success.
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