| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: head of the imaginary wealth with which she gilded her married life.
Ignorant, as all young girls are, of the perils of love and marriage,
she was passionately captivated by the externals of marriage and love.
Is not this as much as to say that her feeling had birth like all the
feelings of extreme youth--sweet but cruel mistakes, which exert a
fatal influence on the lives of young girls so inexperienced as to
trust their own judgment to take care of their future happiness?
Next morning, before Emilie was awake, her uncle had hastened to
Chevreuse. On recognizing, in the courtyard of an elegant little
villa, the young man he had so determinedly insulted the day before,
he went up to him with the pressing politeness of men of the old
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented
himself with preaching a comfortable selfishness, and obtaining
pleasure, made it rather his study to avoid pain. Doubtless both their
theories were popular enough at Alexandria, as they were in France
during the analogous period, the Siecle Louis Quinze. The "Contrat
Social," and the rest of their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will
always have their admirers on earth, as long as that variety of the
human species exists for whose especial behoof Theodorus held that laws
were made; and the whole form of thought met with great approbation in
after years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its highest
perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train of rather severe
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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 A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: Lending soft audience to my sweet design,
And credent soul to that strong-bonded oath,
That shall prefer and undertake my troth.
'This said, his watery eyes he did dismount,
Whose sights till then were levell'd on my face;
Each cheek a river running from a fount
With brinish current downward flow'd apace:
O, how the channel to the stream gave grace!
Who, glaz'd with crystal, gate the glowing roses
That flame through water which their hue encloses.
'O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies
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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 Death of the Lion by Henry James: natural, some universal accident; I'm rendered almost indifferent,
in fact quite gay (ha-ha!) by the sense of immitigable fate. Lady
Augusta promises me to trace the precious object and let me have it
through the post by the time Paraday's well enough to play his part
with it. The last evidence is that her maid did give it to his
lordship's valet. One would suppose it some thrilling number of
THE FAMILY BUDGET. Mrs. Wimbush, who's aware of the accident, is
much less agitated by it than she would doubtless be were she not
for the hour inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham."
Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I
kept a loose diary of the situation, that I had made the
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