| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: house in the Rue Corneille, in spite of our haunting the Bal Musard,
flirting with girls of the town, and leading a careless and apparently
reckless life. Our plans and arguments long floated in the air.
Marcas, our neighbor, was in some degree the guide who led us to the
margin of the precipice or the torrent, who made us sound it, and
showed us beforehand what our fate would be if we let ourselves fall
into it. It was he who put us on our guard against the time-bargains a
man makes with poverty under the sanction of hope, by accepting
precarious situations whence he fights the battle, carried along by
the devious tide of Paris--that great harlot who takes you up or
leaves you stranded, smiles or turns her back on you with equal
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: in New York--and I explained to Ethel what the phrase capitalising one's
premium meant. I showed her the Petunias, too, and we read what it said
on the coupons aloud together. Ethel was at first not quite satisfied
with the arrangement of the coupons. 'Thirty dollars on January first,
and thirty on July first,' she said. That seems a long while to wait for
those payments, Richard. And there are only two in every year, though you
pay them a thousand dollars all at once. It does not seem very prompt on
their part.' I told her that this was the rule. 'But,' she urged, 'don't
you think that a man like Mr. Beverly might be able to get them to make
an exception if he explained the circumstances? Other people may be
satisfied with waiting for little crumbs in this way, but why should we?'
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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 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: did not recognize Yesterday. People no longer had the feeling for
what was grand. There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin.
This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we repeat,
exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange
to us as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a
matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared
beneath two Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly
they cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury,
and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid
Les Miserables |
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 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: What a subject of meditation--even to the very
confines of madness.
"Woman, fragile flower! why were you suffered to adorn a world
exposed to the inroad of such stormy elements?" thought Maria,
while the poor maniac's strain was still breathing on her ear,
and sinking into her very soul.
Towards the evening, Jemima brought her Rousseau's Heloise;
and she sat reading with eyes and heart, till the return of her
guard to extinguish the light. One instance of her kindness was,
the permitting Maria to have one, till her own hour of retiring to
rest. She had read this work long since; but now it seemed to open
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