| 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: victorious march could no longer be arrested by feeble hands.
The coach, which, as we now see, had much to do with the attack of the
Chouans, had started from the little town of Ernee a few moments
before the skirmishing began. Nothing pictures a region so well as the
state of its social material. From this point of view the coach
deserves a mention. The Revolution itself was powerless to destroy it;
in fact, it still rolls to this present day. When Turgot bought up the
privileges of a company, obtained under Louis XIV., for the exclusive
right of transporting travellers from one part of the kingdom to
another, and instituted the lines of coaches called the "turgotines,"
all the old vehicles of the former company flocked into the provinces.
The Chouans |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much
showed for with other people. The thing to be, with the one person
who knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than
be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make
it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather
than pedantic and portentous. Some such consideration as the
latter was doubtless in his mind for instance when he wrote
pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so
long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this
circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house
in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again made,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: brought: it was, that Master Marner had laid by a fine sight of
money somewhere, and that he could buy up "bigger men" than
himself.
But while opinion concerning him had remained nearly stationary, and
his daily habits had presented scarcely any visible change, Marner's
inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis, as that of every
fervid nature must be when it has fled, or been condemned, to
solitude. His life, before he came to Raveloe, had been filled with
the movement, the mental activity, and the close fellowship, which,
in that day as in this, marked the life of an artisan early
incorporated in a narrow religious sect, where the poorest layman
Silas Marner |
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 Fantastic Fables by Ambrose Bierce: appoint my nephew Night Chaplain and Reminder of Mothers and
Sisters."
Religions of Error
HEARING a sound of strife, a Christian in the Orient asked his
Dragoman the cause of it.
"The Buddhists are cutting Mohammedan throats," the Dragoman
replied, with oriental composure.
"I did not know," remarked the Christian, with scientific interest,
"that that would make so much noise."
"The Mohammedans are cutting Buddhist throats, too," added the
Dragoman.
Fantastic Fables |
