| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: the sight, also by the conviction of her danger, she turned hastily to
a little opening protected by iron bars, and saw in a long vaulted
hall the marquis, alone and gloomy, within six feet of her. The
reflection of the fire, before which he was sitting in a clumsy chair,
lighted his face with a vacillating ruddy glow that gave the character
of a vision to the scene. Motionless and trembling, the girl stood
clinging to the bars, to catch his words if he spoke. Seeing him so
depressed, disheartened, and pale, she believed herself to be the
cause of his sadness. Her anger changed to pity, her pity to
tenderness, and she suddenly knew that it was not revenge alone which
had brought her there.
The Chouans |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: MESALLIANCE, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes
along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of
boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were
only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through
the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you
have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la
Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said
"Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a
single moment.
The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have
said, that of another German woman. - I suppose I shall ruin myself
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: then."
Marlow changed his tone.
"I don't know much of the psychology of self-destruction. It's a
sort of subject one has few opportunities to study closely. I knew
a man once who came to my rooms one evening, and while smoking a
cigar confessed to me moodily that he was trying to discover some
graceful way of retiring out of existence. I didn't study his case,
but I had a glimpse of him the other day at a cricket match, with
some women, having a good time. That seems a fairly reasonable
attitude. Considered as a sin, it is a case for repentance before
the throne of a merciful God. But I imagine that Flora de Barral's
Chance |
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 Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: his replying to them in turn; or, like a baited
bull, who, surrounded by his tormentors, is at
a loss to choose from among them the immediate
object of his revenge. At length he spoke, in a
voice half choked with passion; and, addressing
himself to Prince John as the head and front of the
offence which he had received, ``Whatever,'' he said,
``have been the follies and vices of our race, a Saxon
would have been held _nidering_,'' * (the most emphatic
* There was nothing accounted so ignominious among the
* Saxons as to merit this disgraceful epithet. Even William the
Ivanhoe |
