| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bucky O'Connor by William MacLeod Raine: to-morrow, and sometimes I have half a mind to pull out anyhow.
If you've never been associated, me lad, with half a dozen most
divilishly polite senors, each one of them watching the others
out of the corner of his slant eyes for fear they are going to
betray him or assassinate him first, you'll never know the joys
of life in this peaceful and contented land of indolence. Life's
loaded to the guards with uncertainties, so eat, drink, and be
merry, for to-morrow you hang, or your friend will carve ye in
the back with a knife, me old priest used to say, or something
like it. 'Tis certain he must have had in mind the
Spanish-American, my son."
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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: This fierce sea-lion of the sea,
This England lacks some stronger lay,
This modern world hath need of thee!
Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This modern world hath need of thee!
Poem: The Sphinx
(To Marcel Schwob in friendship and in admiration)
In a dim corner of my room for longer than
my fancy thinks
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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 Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: shame, seeing that he was the only one who had not his own wife while
she, who was from this was called La Belle Feroniere, married, after
leaving the king, a young lord, Count of Buzancois. And in her old
days she would relate the story, laughingly adding, that she had never
scented the knave's flavour.
This teaches us not to attach ourselves more than we can help to wives
who refuse to support our yoke.
THE DEVIL'S HEIR
There once was a good old canon of Notre Dame de Paris, who lived in a
fine house of his own, near St. Pierre-aux-Boeufs, in the Parvis. This
canon had come a simple priest to Paris, naked as a dagger without its
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
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 House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: the sole end of existence--but when the opportunity came she had
always shrunk from it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in
love with her--every one at Bellomont had supposed them to be
engaged, and her dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This
view of the Gryce incident chimed too well with Selden's mood not
to be instantly adopted by him, with a flash of retrospective
contempt for what had once seemed the obvious solution. If
rejection there had been--and he wondered now that he had
ever doubted it!--then he held the key to the secret, and the
hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with sunset, but with
dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the face of
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