| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: to me about the man! He never set foot in church excepting to see you
and to be married. People without religion are capable of anything.
Did Guillaume ever dream of hiding anything from me, of spending three
days without saying a word to me, and of chattering afterwards like a
blind magpie?"
"My dear mother, you judge superior people too severely. If their
ideas were the same as other folks', they would not be men of genius."
"Very well, then let men of genius stop at home and not get married.
What! A man of genius is to make his wife miserable? And because he is
a genius it is all right! Genius, genius! It is not so very clever to
say black one minute and white the next, as he does, to interrupt
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: plainly incapable of any higher thought; and when I remarked that
Olalla seemed silent, merely yawned in my face and replied that
speech was of no great use when you had nothing to say. 'People
speak much, very much,' she added, looking at me with expanded
pupils; and then again yawned and again showed me a mouth that was
as dainty as a toy. This time I took the hint, and, leaving her to
her repose, went up into my own chamber to sit by the open window,
looking on the hills and not beholding them, sunk in lustrous and
deep dreams, and hearkening in fancy to the note of a voice that I
had never heard.
I awoke on the fifth morning with a brightness of anticipation that
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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 Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: you remembers and lives by these truths, you will have a happy
life together."
How Sir Philo Married a Beautiful Princess
Instead of the Woman He Loved
Once upon a time--and it had to be pretty long ago, as you will
see--there lived a bunch of people in a little inland kingdom. The
king, Cleon the Modest, was basically a good fellow, though he was
not known for his brilliance in government. Instead, he was known
chiefly for his glowing and nubile daughter, Jennifrella, a girl,
though proud and a trifle petulant, so freighted with beauty and
charms that pretty much every bachelor--and not a few married
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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 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: strike a mass of blocked trucks, splitting it into fragments, as a
blow annihilates a cake of ice, Jimmie's team could usually be
observed high and safe, with whole wheels, on the sidewalk.
The fearful coming of the engine could break up the most intricate
muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had been swearing for
the half of an hour.
A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing
that he loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been
known to overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking
sparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures
to be ineffably admired. The clang of the gong pierced his breast
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
