| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: inquiries and researches, could find no traces of
them. They were at length given up for dead.
Dorothea was never again heard of; nor was any
thing known of Salome from 1818 till 1843.
In the summer of that year, Madame Karl, a
German woman who had come over in the same
ship with the Mullers, was passing through a street
in New Orleans, and accidentally saw Salome in a
wine-shop, belonging to Louis Belmonte, by whom
she was held as a slave. Madame Karl recognised
her at once, and carried her to the house of another
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: hidden in her heart, and he said one day to d'Arthez,--
"She has loved that brigand Philippe too well not to want to see him
before she dies."
Joseph begged Bixiou, who frequented the Bohemian regions where
Philippe was still occasionally to be found, to persuade that
shameless son to play, if only out of pity, a little comedy of
tenderness which might wrap the mother's heart in a winding-sheet of
illusive happiness. Bixiou, in his capacity as an observing and
misanthropical scoffer, desired nothing better than to undertake such
a mission. When he had made known Madame Bridau's condition to the
Comte de Brambourg, who received him in a bedroom hung with yellow
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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 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: have been embedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless
for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and
dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind,
and the chillest of social atmospheres; -- all these, and
whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the
purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the
natal spot were an earthly paradise. So has it been in my case.
I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the
mould of features and cast of character which had all along been
familiar here -- ever, as one representative of the race lay down
in the grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march
The Scarlet Letter |
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 Protagoras by Plato: poem of Simonides. There is a very ancient philosophy which is more
cultivated in Crete and Lacedaemon than in any other part of Hellas, and
there are more philosophers in those countries than anywhere else in the
world. This, however, is a secret which the Lacedaemonians deny; and they
pretend to be ignorant, just because they do not wish to have it thought
that they rule the world by wisdom, like the Sophists of whom Protagoras
was speaking, and not by valour of arms; considering that if the reason of
their superiority were disclosed, all men would be practising their wisdom.
And this secret of theirs has never been discovered by the imitators of
Lacedaemonian fashions in other cities, who go about with their ears
bruised in imitation of them, and have the caestus bound on their arms, and
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