| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: compelled to stifle their longings. And yet, in spite of himself, he
broke the silence to say in a faltering voice:
"Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest emotions of my
life, and own to all that you have made me feel. You set the heart in
me swelling high! I feel within me a longing to make you forget your
mortifications, to devote my life to this, to give you love for all
who ever have given you wounds or hate. But this is a very sudden
outpouring of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I ought
not----"
"Enough, monsieur," said Mme. de Beauseant; "we have both of us gone
too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a refusal which I am
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: his brush, some fibre in his creations, some sentiment in his poetry.
When braggarts, self-satisfied and in love with themselves, step early
into the fame which belongs rightly to their future achievements, they
are men of genius only in the eyes of fools. If talent is to be
measured by youthful shyness, by that indefinable modesty which men
born to glory lose in the practice of their art, as a pretty woman
loses hers among the artifices of coquetry, then this unknown young
man might claim to be possessed of genuine merit. The habit of success
lessens doubt; and modesty, perhaps, is doubt.
Worn down with poverty and discouragement, and dismayed at this moment
by his own presumption, the young neophyte might not have dared to
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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 Awakening & Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin: "You mean like an adoring dog. And just as soon as Ratignolle
appeared on the scene, then it WAS like a dog. `Passez! Adieu!
Allez vous-en!'"
"Perhaps I feared to make Alphonse jealous," she interjoined, with
excessive naivete. That made them all laugh. The right hand
jealous of the left! The heart jealous of the soul! But for that
matter, the Creole husband is never jealous; with him the gangrene
passion is one which has become dwarfed by disuse.
Meanwhile Robert, addressing Mrs Pontellier, continued to tell
of his one time hopeless passion for Madame Ratignolle; of
sleepless nights, of consuming flames till the very sea sizzled
Awakening & Selected Short Stories |
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 $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.
This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism
that our family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that
one stuck out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and summer.
Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar."
He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand. And he could imitate anybody's
hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head
off to see it. He had infinite sport with his talent. But by and
by he took a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness
of the work spoiled his hand. Still, he enjoyed life all the time
he was in the stone business, which, with inconsiderable intervals,
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