| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: pressure of their clasping hands. They praised each other's beauties
ingenuously, spending treasures of language on these secret idylls,
inventing soft exaggerations and more diminutives than the ancient
muse of Tibullus, or the poesies of Italy. On their lips and in their
hearts love flowed ever, like the liquid fringes of the sea upon the
sands of the shore,--all alike, all dissimilar. Joyous, eternal
fidelity!
If we must count by days, the time thus spent was five months only; if
we may count by the innumerable sensations, thoughts, dreams, glances,
opening flowers, realized hopes, unceasing joys, speeches interrupted,
renewed, abandoned, frolic laughter, bare feet dabbling in the sea,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet hearty
and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:
such is the winter daytime in the Alps.
With the approach of evening all is changed. A mountain will
suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that are
no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile, overhead, if
the weather be rightly characteristic of the place, the sky fades
towards night through a surprising key of colours. The latest gold
leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon shall rise,
and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and misted, and
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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 To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: forgotten a single one of you in the world. Some
gave me more than money--but I am a beggar now
--and you women always had to get me out of my
scrapes."
He swaggered up to the parlour window, and in
the dim light filtering through the blind, looked at
the coin lying in his palm. It was a half-sovereign.
He slipped it into his pocket. She stood a little on
one side, with her head drooping, as if wounded;
with her arms hanging passive by her side, as if
dead.
To-morrow |
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 Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: succeed in this compassionate design. He would write a letter at once
to allay her suspicions. /A letter!/ For a woman with the most
exquisite feminine perception, as well as the intuition of passionate
love, a letter in itself was a sentence of death.
So when Jacques came and brought Mme. de Beauseant a sheet of paper
folded in a triangle, she trembled, poor woman, like a snared swallow.
A mysterious sensation of physical cold spread from head to foot,
wrapping her about in an icy winding sheet. If he did not rush to her
feet, if he did not come to her in tears, and pale, and like a lover,
she knew that all was lost. And yet, so many hopes are there in the
heart of a woman who loves, that she is only slain by stab after stab,
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