| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: witty." Genius always presupposes moral insight. This insight may
be applied to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must
be able to see the sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has
saved ask, "How is the Emperor?" could say, "The courtier is
alive; the man will follow!"--that man is not merely a surgeon or
a physician, he is prodigiously witty also. Hence a patient and
diligent student of human nature will admit Desplein's exorbitant
pretensions, and believe--as he himself believed--that he might
have been no less great as a minister than he was as a surgeon.
Among the riddles which Desplein's life presents to many of his
contemporaries, we have chosen one of the most interesting,
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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 Youth by Joseph Conrad: lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort--to
death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat
of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that
with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and
expires--and expires, too soon--before life itself.
"And this is how I see the East. I have seen its secret
places and have looked into its very soul; but now I see
it always from a small boat, a high outline of mountains,
blue and afar in the morning; like faint mist at noon; a
jagged wall of purple at sunset. I have the feel of the
oar in my hand, the vision of a scorching blue sea in my
Youth |
