| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: investigation; for in such a man there ought to be no direct
antagonism of thought and action.
Next year, on the said day and hour, Bianchon, who had already
ceased to be Desplein's house surgeon, saw the great man's cab
standing at the corner of the Rue de Tournon and the Rue du
Petit-Lion, whence his friend jesuitically crept along by the
wall of Saint-Sulpice, and once more attended mass in front of
the Virgin's altar. It was Desplein, sure enough! The master-
surgeon, the atheist at heart, the worshiper by chance. The
mystery was greater than ever; the regularity of the phenomenon
complicated it. When Desplein had left, Bianchon went to the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: a roll of thin leather was twined artificially round
the legs, and, ascending above the calf, left the
knees bare, like those of a Scottish Highlander.
To make the jacket sit yet more close to the body,
it was gathered at the middle by a broad leathern
belt, secured by a brass buckle; to one side of
which was attached a sort of scrip, and to the other
a ram's horn, accoutred with a mouthpiece, for the
purpose of blowing. In the same belt was stuck
one of those long, broad, sharp-pointed, and two-edged
knives, with a buck's-horn handle, which
Ivanhoe |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: triumph, but she remained to talk something in the nature of sense!
She put herself completely in my hands--she does me the honour to
intimate that of all her friends I'm the most disinterested. After
she had announced to me that Lord Iffield was utterly committed to
her and that for the present I was absolutely the only person in
the secret, she arrived at her real business. She had had a
suspicion of me ever since that day at Folkestone when I asked her
for the truth about her eyes. The truth is what you and I both
guessed. She's in very bad danger."
"But from what cause? I, who by God's mercy have kept mine, know
everything that can be known about eyes," said Mrs. Meldrum.
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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 The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: signs of invasion, late in July, and a certain Mrs. Fosdick
appeared like a strange sail on the far horizon, I suffered much
from apprehension. I had been living in the quaint little house
with as much comfort and unconsciousness as if it were a larger
body, or a double shell, in whose simple convolutions Mrs. Todd and
I had secreted ourselves, until some wandering hermit crab of a
visitor marked the little spare room for her own. Perhaps now and
then a castaway on a lonely desert island dreads the thought of
being rescued. I heard of Mrs. Fosdick for the first time with a
selfish sense of objection; but after all, I was still vacation-
tenant of the schoolhouse, where I could always be alone, and it
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