| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: And friend to friend gives unadvised wounds,
And one man's lust these many lives confounds:
Had doting Priam check'd his son's desire,
Troy had been bright with fame and not with fire.'
Here feelingly she weeps Troy's painted woes:
For sorrow, like a heavy-hanging bell,
Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes;
Then little strength rings out the doleful knell:
So Lucrece set a-work sad tales doth tell
To pencill'd pensiveness and colour'd sorrow;
She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: "Why," he cried aloud in the midst of a field where he was pretending
to examine a vine, "it would be cutting my throat!"
He came at last to a decision, and returned to Saumur in time for
dinner, resolved to unbend to Eugenie, and pet and coax her, that he
might die regally, holding the reins of his millions in his own hands
so long as the breath was in his body. At the moment when the old man,
who chanced to have his pass-key in his pocket, opened the door and
climbed with a stealthy step up the stairway to go into his wife's
room, Eugenie had brought the beautiful dressing-case from the oak
cabinet and placed it on her mother's bed. Mother and daughter, in
Grandet's absence, allowed themselves the pleasure of looking for a
Eugenie Grandet |
