| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: woman; his past life in some measure explaining the extraordinary
fact. He had been thrown, when little more than a boy, into the
hurricane of Napoleon's wars; his life had been spent on fields
of battle. Of women he knew just so much as a traveller knows of
a country when he travels across it in haste from one inn to
another. The verdict which Voltaire passed upon his eighty years
of life might, perhaps, have been applied by Montriveau to his
own thirty-seven years of existence; had he not thirty-seven
follies with which to reproach himself? At his age he was as
much a novice in love as the lad that has just been furtively
reading Faublas. Of women he had nothing to learn; of love he
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less
fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray
to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
Second Inaugural Address |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Koran: to flee away therein?' These are those whose resort is hell, and a bad
journey shall it be!
Save for the weak men, and women, and children, who could not
compass any stratagem, and were not guided to a way; these it may be
God will pardon, for God both pardons and forgives.
Whosoever flees in the way of God shall find in the earth many a
spacious refuge; and he who goes forth from his house, fleeing unto
God and His prophet, and then death catches him up,- his hire devolves
on God, and God is forgiving and merciful.
And when ye knock about in the earth, it is no crime to you that
ye come short in prayer, if ye fear that those who disbelieve will set
The Koran |
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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has
nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist,
girder, and pane grows continually without altering the shape of
the whole; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied
in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has, as it were, to
justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a shell capable
of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess Him to
have been as great when first His Spirit brooded on the deep, as He
is now and will be through all worlds to come.
But we must make haste; for the tide is rising fast, and our stone
will be restored to its eleven hours' bath, long before we have
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