| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine that I
worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and
fast, when we found that we were in the same confraternity of
love. It was which of us should overtop the other in sentiment.
One of us had traveled six hundred miles to see his mistress for
an hour. The other, at the risk of being shot for a wolf, had
prowled about her park to meet her one night. Out came all our
follies in fact. If it is pleasant to remember past dangers, is
it not at least as pleasant to recall past delights? We live
through the joy a second time. We told each other everything, our
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.
O twining hands! O delicate
White body made for love and pain!
O House of love! O desolate
Pale flower beaten by the rain!
Poem: Chanson
A ring of gold and a milk-white dove
Are goodly gifts for thee,
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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 On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill
will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a
few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their
constitution, of retracting or altering their present
demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal
to any other millions, why expose yourself to this
overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and
hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you
quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do
not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as
I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
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 Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: ever fails to stop in front of those windows, each of a different
design, vying with each other in fantastic ornament, with balconies
like lace-work; to study the corners finishing in tall and slender
twisted columns, the string-courses wrought by so inventive a chisel
that no two shapes are alike in the arabesques on the stones.
How charming is that doorway! how mysterious the vaulted arcade
leading to the stairs! Who could fail to admire the steps on which
ingenious art has laid a carpet that will last while Venice stands,--a
carpet as rich as if wrought in Turkey, but composed of marbles in
endless variety of shapes, inlaid in white marble. You will delight in
the charming ornament of the colonnades of the upper story,--gilt like
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