| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: "You seem very poorly, citoyenne----"
"Perhaps madame might like to take something," the wife broke in.
"We have some very nice broth," added the pastry-cook.
"And it is so cold," continued his wife; "perhaps you have caught a
chill, madame, on your way here. But you can rest and warm yourself a
bit."
"We are not so black as the devil!" cried the man.
The kindly intention in the words and tones of the charitable couple
won the old lady's confidence. She said that a strange man had been
following her, and she was afraid to go home alone.
"Is that all!" returned he of the red bonnet; "wait for me,
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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 Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: not to be absolutely infinite in extent, we may hold that the day
of doom, so often postponed, must come at last. The concentration
of matter and dissipation of energy, so often checked, must in
the end prevail, so that, as the final outcome of things, the
entire universe will be reduced to a single enormous ball, dead
and frozen, solid and black, its potential energy of motion
having been all transformed into heat and radiated away. Such a
conclusion has been suggested by Sir William Thomson, and it is
quite forcibly stated by the authors of "The Unseen Universe."
They remind us that "if there be any one form of energy less
readily or less completely transformable than the others, and if
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
