| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: pocket. After that inexorable movement, she came over to me and put a
diamond into my hands. "Take it," she said, "and be gone."
" 'We exchanged values, and I made my bow and went. The diamond was
quite worth twelve hundred francs to me. Out in the courtyard I saw a
swarm of flunkeys, brushing out their liveries, waxing their boots,
and cleaning sumptuous equipages.
" ' "This is what brings these people to me!" said I to myself. "It is
to keep up this kind of thing that they steal millions with all due
formalities, and betray their country. The great lord, and the little
man who apes the great lord, bathes in mud once for all to save
himself a splash or two when he goes afoot through the streets."
Gobseck |
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 Walden by Henry David Thoreau: pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and
fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they
now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond
in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many
unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian
Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is
a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some
trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect
encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down
on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside,
Walden |
