| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lemorne Versus Huell by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard: shut out the moonlight my eager soul longed to leap out into the
dark and demand of him his heart, soul, life, for *me*.
I struck him lightly on the shoulder; he seized my hand.
"Oh, I know you, Margaret; you are mine!"
"We are at the hotel."
He sent the carriage back, and said that he would leave me at my
aunt's door. He wished that he could see her then. Was it magic
that made her open the door before I reached it?
"Have you come on legal business?" she asked him.
"You have divined what I come for."
"Step in, step in; it's very late. I should have been in bed but
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: glasses clink around the china punch-bowl, some one
touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on
the chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the
red firelight. That is not an ugly picture in itself,
nor will it become ugly upon repetition. All the better
if the like were going on in every second room; the LAND
would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
In one house, perhaps, two-score families herd together;
and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach
of want. The great hotel is given over to discomfort
from the foundation to the chimney-tops; everywhere a
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: my address. The rest I leave to my notary. Who lives opposite?" he
asked, as they left the house.
"Emigres," answered the post master, "named Portenduere."
The house once bought, the illustrious doctor, instead of leaving
there, wrote to his nephew to let it. The Folie-Levraught was
therefore occupied by the notary of Nemours, who about that time sold
his practice to Dionis, his head-clerk, and died two years later,
leaving the house on the doctor's hands, just at the time when the
fate of Napoleon was being decided in the neighbourhood. The doctor's
heirs, at first misled, had by this time decided that his thought of
returning to his native place was merely a rich man's fancy, and that
|
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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: safety and glory. Terentia, therefore, as she was otherwise in
her own nature neither tender-hearted nor timorous, but a woman
eager for distinction (who, as Cicero himself says, would rather
thrust herself into his public affairs, than communicate her
domestic matters to him), told him these things, and excited him
against the conspirators. So also did Quintus his brother, and
Publius Nigidius, one of his philosophical friends, whom he
often made use of in his greatest and most weighty affairs of
state.
The next day, a debate arising in the senate about the
punishment of the men, Silanus, being the first who was asked
|
