The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: idea until she hatches it. A strange assemblage of virtues and
defects! which her Spanish nature had strengthened in Madame
Evangelista, and over which her French experience had cast the glaze
of its politeness.
This character, slumbering in married happiness for sixteen years,
occupied since then with the trivialities of social life, this nature
to which a first hatred had revealed its strength, awoke now like a
conflagration; at the moment of the woman's life when she was losing
the dearest object of her affections and needed another element for
the energy that possessed her, this flame burst forth. Natalie could
be but three days more beneath her influence! Madame Evangelista,
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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 Phaedrus by Plato: that of Lysias on the same theme, and also different from his, if he may be
allowed the use of a few commonplaces which all speakers must equally
employ.
Phaedrus is delighted at the prospect of having another speech, and
promises that he will set up a golden statue of Socrates at Delphi, if he
keeps his word. Some raillery ensues, and at length Socrates, conquered by
the threat that he shall never again hear a speech of Lysias unless he
fulfils his promise, veils his face and begins.
First, invoking the Muses and assuming ironically the person of the non-
lover (who is a lover all the same), he will enquire into the nature and
power of love. For this is a necessary preliminary to the other question--
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