| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: soft kind of moonlight in his eyes, you know, -- and
they kept saying it wouldn't go. It made him hot to
hear them, and he would turn on them and shake his
fist and say they was animals and blind, but some day
they would find they had stood face to face with one
of the men that lifts up nations and makes civilizations,
and was too dull to know it; and right here on this
spot their own children and grandchildren would build
a monument to him that would outlast a thousand
years, but his name would outlast the monument.
And then the crowd would burst out in a laugh again,
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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 Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: so many cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to
have a year's income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of
our returns."
Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it;
Dinah flung herself against a will of iron padded round with
gentleness. She tried to fill the little man's soul with jealousy and
alarms, but it was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah,
when he went to Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique's
fidelity. When she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by
the scorn a courtesan sometimes shows to her "protector," and which
acts on him with the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur
The Muse of the Department |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Sad and dejected,
Others may view;
But, on us gently
Shineth a true one,
And to the new one
We, too, are new.
As a fond couple
'Midst the dance veering,
First disappearing,
Then reappear,
So let affection
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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 A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: an absolute love, and the love of Raoul and Marie had not bound them
together by the mysterious and inalienable ties of happiness. But
supposing that the countess did follow him to some foreign country;
she would come without fortune, despoiled of everything, and then,
alas! she would merely be one more embarrassment to him. A mind of a
second order, and a proud mind like that of Nathan, would be likely to
see, under these circumstances, and did see, in suicide the sword to
cut the Gordian knots. The idea of failure in the face of the world
and that society he had so lately entered and meant to rule, of
leaving the chariot of the countess and becoming once more a muddied
pedestrian, was more than he could bear. Madness began to dance and
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