| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: serfs who had been placed under his control. Although this man
had a wife and two married daughters, and was making so much
money that he could have lived happily without transgressing in
any way against either God or man, yet he was filled with envy
and jealousy and deeply sunk in sin.
Michael Simeonovitch began his persecutions by compelling the
peasants to perform more days of service on the estate every week
than the laws obliged them to work. He established a brick-yard,
in which he forced the men and women to do excessive labor,
selling the bricks for his own profit.
On one occasion the overworked serfs sent a delegation to Moscow
 The Kreutzer Sonata |
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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulnesses
even, of the romantic temperament also. He was the first person
who ever said to people that they should live 'flower-like lives.'
He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type of what people
should try to become. He held them up as examples to their elders,
which I myself have always thought the chief use of children, if
what is perfect should have a use. Dante describes the soul of a
man as coming from the hand of God 'weeping and laughing like a
little child,' and Christ also saw that the soul of each one should
be A GUISA DI FANCIULLA CHE PIANGENDO E RIDENDO PARGOLEGGIA. He
felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it
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