| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: and sun, winter, summer, and snow have eaten into the wood, warped the
boards, peeled off the paint. The dreary silence is broken only by
birds and cats, polecats, rats, and mice, free to scamper round, and
fight, and eat each other. An invisible hand has written over it all:
'Mystery.'
"If, prompted by curiosity, you go to look at this house from the
street, you will see a large gate, with a round-arched top; the
children have made many holes in it. I learned later that this door
had been blocked for ten years. Through these irregular breaches you
will see that the side towards the courtyard is in perfect harmony
with the side towards the garden. The same ruin prevails. Tufts of
La Grande Breteche |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pericles by William Shakespeare: Make such unquiet, that the ship
Should house him safe is wreck'd and split;
And he, good prince, having all lost,
By waves from coast to coast is tost:
All perishen of man, of pelf,
Ne aught escapen but himself;
Till fortune, tired with doing bad,
Threw him ashore, to give him glad:
And here he comes. What shall be next,
Pardon old Gower, -- this longs the text.
[Exit.]
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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 Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: much like a cart-horse as all the cunning of his master and the
grooms could make him, and just in this manner he beat some of the
greatest gamesters in the field.
I was so sick of the jockeying part that I left the crowd about the
posts and pleased myself with observing the horses: how the
creatures yielded to all the arts and managements of their masters;
how they took their airings in sport, and played with the daily
heats which they ran over the course before the grand day. But
how, as knowing the difference equally with their riders, would
they exert their utmost strength at the time of the race itself!
And that to such an extremity that one or two of them died in the
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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 The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: days. More than once during the Retreat I had owed my life to him. He
was a quartermaster, Renard by name; we could not but be like brothers
(military discipline apart) after what he had done for me. They
billeted us on the same house, a sort of shanty, a rat-hole of a place
where a whole family lived, though you would not have thought there
was room to stable a horse. This particular hovel belonged to some
Jews who carried on their six-and-thirty trades in it. The frost had
not so stiffened the old father Jew's fingers but that he could count
gold fast enough; he had thriven uncommonly during our reverses. That
sort of gentry lives in squalor and dies in gold.
"There were cellars underneath (lined with wood of course, the whole
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