| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: no longer cats and little birds, she prepared the breakfast at her own
fire and carried it into the studio, where she ate it with her son.
She then arranged Joseph's bedroom, put out the fire in her own
chamber, and brought her sewing to the studio, where she sat by the
little iron stove, leaving the room if a comrade or a model entered
it. Though she understood nothing whatever of art, the silence of the
studio suited her. In the matter of art she made not the slightest
progress; she attempted no hypocrisy; she was utterly amazed at the
importance they all attached to color, composition, drawing. When the
Cenacle friends or some brother-painter, like Schinner, Pierre
Grassou, Leon de Lora,--a very youthful "rapin" who was called at that
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: some of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the
summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud,
hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping
from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and
thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed
almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly
regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream to
look at it.
To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so
readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was
rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn,
The Snow Image |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: to respond to love. Their love knows passion and jealousy and the most
gracious delicacy of feeling; they find the tenderest words of
expression; they trust you--put an entire belief in you. Perhaps there
are no undutiful children without undutiful mothers, for a child's
affection is always in proportion to the affection that it receives--
in early care, in the first words that it hears, in the response of
the eyes to which a child first looks for love and life. All these
things draw them closer to the mother or drive them apart. God lays
the child under the mother's heart, that she may learn that for a long
time to come her heart must be its home. And yet--there are mothers
cruelly slighted, mothers whose sublime, pathetic tenderness meets
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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 Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: and your quest is ended, and my candle is out."
Now when the morning came, the man gave him a clear pebble in his
hand, and it had no beauty and no colour; and the elder son looked
upon it scornfully and shook his head; and he went away, for it
seemed a small affair to him.
All that day he rode, and his mind was quiet, and the desire of the
chase allayed. "How if this poor pebble be the touchstone, after
all?" said he: and he got down from his horse, and emptied forth
his wallet by the side of the way. Now, in the light of each
other, all the touchstones lost their hue and fire, and withered
like stars at morning; but in the light of the pebble, their beauty
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