| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Cromwell by William Shakespeare: They neither plow, nor sow, and yet they reap
The fat of all the Land, and suck the poor:
Look, what was theirs, is in King Henry's hands;
His wealth before lay in the Abbey lands.
GARDINER.
Indeed these things you have alleged, my Lord,
When God doth know the infant yet unborn
Will curse the time the Abbeys were pulled down.
I pray, now where is hospitality?
Where now may poor distressed people go,
For to relieve their need, or rest their bones,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: high, sent, it may be, to protect you from some great evil."
"The only evil could be that he did not love me."
"Always HE!"
"Yes, always," she answered. "He is my life, my good, my thought. Even
if I obeyed you he would be ever in my soul. To forbid me to marry him
is to make me hate you."
"You love us not!" cried Piombo.
"Oh!" said Ginevra, shaking her head.
"Well, then, forget him; be faithful to us. After we are gone--you
understand?"
"Father, do you wish me to long for your death?" cried Ginevra.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: Their most characteristic result was not the "Key to all Mythologies,"
but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place
which he had not demonstrably merited--a perpetual suspicious
conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage--
a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a
passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.
Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have
absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds,
least of all against those which came from Dorothea. And he had
begun now to frame possibilities for the future which were somehow
more embittering to him than anything his mind had dwelt on before.
Middlemarch |
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 Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: on him and beyond him, and her face beamed with joy. But the
words she spoke were very different from what her eyes said.
"You should not speak like that," she said.
"I am saying it so that you should know."
"Everything has been said about that, and there is no use
speaking," she said, with difficulty repressing a smile.
A sudden noise came from the hospital ward, and the sound of a
child crying.
"I think they are calling me," she said, and looked round
uneasily.
"Well, good-bye, then," he said. She pretended not to see his
Resurrection |
