| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: must train oneself to do what benefits them. That needs still
harder work, especially at your age, when it is one's natural
business to be studying.
Third, in order to love people and to b. l. b. t.,¹ one
must train oneself to gentleness, humility, the art of bearing with
disagreeable people and things, the art of behaving to them so as
not to offend any one, of being able to choose the least offense.
And this is the hardest work of all--work that never ceases from
the time you wake till the time you go to sleep, and the most
joyful work of all, because day after day you rejoice in your
growing success in it, and receive a further reward, unperceived
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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 Koran: will inform you that when ye are torn all to pieces, then ye shall
be a new creation? he has forged against God a lie, or there is a ginn
in him;'-nay, those who believe not in the hereafter are in the
torment and in the remote error!
Have they not looked at what is before them and what is behind
them of the heaven and the earth? if we pleased we would cleave the
earth open with them, or we would make to fall upon them a portion
of the heaven; verily, in that is a sign to every repentant servant.
And we did give David grace from us, 'O ye mountains! echo (God's
praises) with him, and ye birds!' and we softened for him iron:
'Make thou coats of mail and adapt the rings thereof, and do right;
The Koran |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: thesis admirably argued not long since at the Sorbonne.
The stranger looked down from his raised position on the crowd below
with that deep glance that held a whole poem of sorrow, and those who
met his eye felt an indescribable thrill. The lad, following the old
man, sat down on one of the steps, leaning against the pulpit in a
graceful and melancholy attitude. The silence was now profound, and
the doorway and even the street were blocked by scholars who had
deserted the other classes.
Doctor Sigier was to-day to recapitulate, in the last of a series of
discourses, the views he had set forth in the former lectures on the
Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell. His strange doctrine responded to 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 Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: to speak of. If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell
you."
"But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall
it be?"
"I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-
morrow night, sir."
"I will come at eleven."
He thanked me, and went out at the door with me. "I'll show my
white light, sir," he said, in his peculiar low voice, "till you
have found the way up. When you have found it, don't call out!
And when you are at the top, don't call out!"
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