| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: parliamentary opposition, but with the commission to kill a parliament,
and, moreover, as an ally of all his arch enemies, the Jesuits and the
Legitimists. Finally he leads the bride home, but only after she has
been prostituted. As to Bonaparte, he seemed to eclipse himself
completely. The party of Order acted for him.
Immediately at the first session of the ministry the expedition to Rome
was decided upon, which it was there agreed, was to be carried out
behind I the back of the National Assembly, and the funds for which, it
was equally agreed, were to be wrung from the Assembly under false
pretences. Thus the start was made with a swindle on the National
Assembly, together with a secret conspiracy with the absolute foreign
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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 Altar of the Dead by Henry James: are the lettered mile-stones. He had in general little taste for
the past as a part of his own history; at other times and in other
places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible
to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with something of
that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self to an ache
that begins to succumb to treatment. To the treatment of time the
malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him. The
day was written for him there on which he had first become
acquainted with death, and the successive phases of the
acquaintance were marked each with a flame.
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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 The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: sphere, and waking by its touch confused ideas within the soul. We can
no more define the moral phenomena of this species of fascination than
we can render in words the emotions excited in the heart of an exile
by a song which recalls his fatherland. The contempt which the old man
affected to pour upon the noblest efforts of art, his wealth, his
manners, the respectful deference shown to him by Porbus, his work
guarded so secretly,--a work of patient toil, a work no doubt of
genius, judging by the head of the Virgin which Poussin had so naively
admired, and which, beautiful beside even the Adam of Mabuse, betrayed
the imperial touch of a great artist,--in short, everything about the
strange old man seemed beyond the limits of human nature. The rich
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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 Voice of the City by O. Henry: me the best place in the world. I'd have been happy
to live there always, too, if --
"But one morning old Mrs. Gurley, the widow
lady, got gossipy while I was helping her string beans
on the back porch, and began to gush information, as
folks who rent out their rooms usually do. Mr. Lyle
was her idea of a saint on earth -- as he was mine,
too. She went over all his virtues and graces, and
wound up by telling me that Arthur had had an ex-
tremely romantic love-affair, not long before, that had
ended unhappily. She didn't seem to be on to the de-
The Voice of the City |
