| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: Outland. It's the simplest thing possible. I wonder nobody ever
thought of it before! And you never saw such universal joy.
The shops are full from morning to night. Everybody's buying everything!"
"And how was the glorifying done?"
A sudden gloom overcast the Professor's jolly face. "They did it as I
went home after the Election," he mournfully replied. "It was kindly
meant but I didn't like it! They waved flags all round me till I was
nearly blind: and they rang bells till I was nearly deaf: and they
strewed the road so thick with flowers that I lost my way!" And the
poor old man sighed deeply.
"How far is it to Outland?" I asked, to change the subject.
Sylvie and Bruno |
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 Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: aptitudes of a statesman; still it might yet be a question whether he
would prove to be a solid politician, or had merely been moulded in
the fire of circumstance. This question had just been asked by a man
whom he had made a prefet, a man of wit and observation, who had for a
long time been a journalist, and who admired de Marsay without
infusing into his admiration that dash of acrid criticism by which, in
Paris, one superior man excuses himself from admiring another.
"Was there ever," said he, "in your former life, any event, any
thought or wish which told you what your vocation was?" asked Emile
Blondet; "for we all, like Newton, have our apple, which falls and
leads us to the spot where our faculties develop----"
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