| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: throat... What witchcraft has he learned? what secret has he found -- this
scowling man of the road?... Oh! is there anybody else in the whole world
who can sing like that?... And the form of the singer flickers and dims;--
and the house, and the lawn, and all visible shapes of things tremble and
swim before me. Yet instinctively I fear that man;-- I almost hate him; and
I feel myself flushing with anger and shame because of his power to move me
thus...
"He made you cry," Robert compassionately observes, to my further
confusion,-- as the harper strides away, richer by a gift of sixpence taken
without thanks... "But I think he must be a gipsy. Gipsies are bad people
-- and they are wizards... Let us go back to the wood."
Kwaidan |
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 An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: silk.
The bare walls looked all the barer, because the one thing that hung
there was the great ivory and ebony crucifix, which of necessity
attracted the eyes. Four slender little altar candles, which the
Sisters had contrived to fasten into their places with sealing-wax,
gave a faint, pale light, almost absorbed by the walls; the rest of
the room lay well-nigh in the dark. But the dim brightness,
concentrated upon the holy things, looked like a ray from Heaven
shining down upon the unadorned shrine. The floor was reeking with
damp. An icy wind swept in through the chinks here and there, in a
roof that rose sharply on either side, after the fashion of attic
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