| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: In spite of physic, painting, pain and cost.
XIV.
Good night, good rest. Ah, neither be my share:
She bade good night that kept my rest away;
And daff'd me to a cabin hang'd with care,
To descant on the doubts of my decay.
'Farewell,' quoth she, 'and come again tomorrow:
Fare well I could not, for I supp'd with sorrow.
Yet at my parting sweetly did she smile,
In scorn or friendship, nill I construe whether:
'T may be, she joy'd to jest at my exile,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: than a working man, and cared nothing for appearances, I did not put
them on their guard; I could join a group and look on while they drove
bargains or wrangled among themselves on their way home from work.
Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of
penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a
power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never
detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through
them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I
watched, just as the dervish in the /Arabian Nights/ could pass into
any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.
If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven
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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 Royalty Restored/London Under Charles II by J. Fitzgerald Molloy: Dover, where the duke awaited her, attended by a scant retinue.
For the recent protestations, made in the House of Commons
against the marriage, having the effect of scaring the courtiers,
few of the nobility, and but one of the bishops, Dr. Crew of
Oxford, ventured to accompany him, or greet his bride. On the
day of her arrival the marriage was celebrated, "according to the
usual form in cases of the like nature." The "Stuart Papers"
give a brief account of the ceremony. "The Duke and Duchess of
York, with the Duchess of Modena her mother, being together in a
room where all the company was present, as also my Lord
Peterborough, the bishop asked the Duchess of Modena and the Earl
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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 Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: daughter of a member of the Convention who had perished on the
scaffold. This ambitious Piedefer died in 1819, leaving a little girl
of remarkable beauty. This child, brought up in the Calvinist faith,
was named Dinah, in accordance with the custom in use among the sect,
of taking their Christian names from the Bible, so as to have nothing
in common with the Saints of the Roman Church.
Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer was placed by her mother in one of the
best schools in Bourges, that kept by the Demoiselles Chamarolles, and
was soon as highly distinguished for the qualities of her mind as for
her beauty; but she found herself snubbed by girls of birth and
fortune, destined by-and-by to play a greater part in the world than a
The Muse of the Department |
