| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: stupefaction. "What!" he at last exclaimed, mournfully. "Show my
creature, my spouse?--tear off the veil with which I have chastely
hidden my joy? It would be prostitution! For ten years I have lived
with this woman; she is mine, mine alone! she loves me! Has she not
smiled upon me as, touch by touch, I painted her? She has a soul,--the
soul with which I endowed her. She would blush if other eyes than mine
beheld her. Let her be seen?--where is the husband, the lover, so
debased as to lend his wife to dishonor? When you paint a picture for
the court you do not put your whole soul into it; you sell to
courtiers your tricked-out lay-figures. My painting is not a picture;
it is a sentiment, a passion! Born in my atelier, she must remain a
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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 Princess by Alfred Tennyson: Of female whisperers: at the further end
Was Ida by the throne, the two great cats
Close by her, like supporters on a shield,
Bow-backed with fear: but in the centre stood
The common men with rolling eyes; amazed
They glared upon the women, and aghast
The women stared at these, all silent, save
When armour clashed or jingled, while the day,
Descending, struck athwart the hall, and shot
A flying splendour out of brass and steel,
That o'er the statues leapt from head to head,
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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 The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: Peace was on the ship; you could hear what the Fourth in his white
ducks said to the quartermaster in his blue denims; you could count
the strokes of the electric bell in the wheel-house; peace was on
the ship as she pushed on, an ever-venturing, double-funneled
impertinence, through the sands of the ages. My eyes wandered along
a plank-line in the deck till they were arrested by a petticoat I
knew, when they returned of their own accord. I seemed to be always
seeing that petticoat.
'I think,' resumed Mrs. Morgan, whose glance had wandered in the
same direction, 'that Cecily is a very fine type of our English
girls. With those dark grey eyes, a LITTLE prominent possibly, and
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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 Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: snow in front of them.
'We'll see what forest it is when we get there,' said Nikita.
He saw that beside the black thing they had noticed, dry,
oblong willow-leaves were fluttering, and so he knew it was not
a forest but a settlement, but he did not wish to say so. And
in fact they had not gone twenty-five yards beyond the ditch
before something in front of them, evidently trees, showed up
black, and they heard a new and melancholy sound. Nikita had
guessed right: it was not a wood, but a row of tall willows
with a few leaves still fluttering on them here and there.
They had evidently been planted along the ditch round a
Master and Man |
