| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Cromwell by William Shakespeare: By heaven and earth I'll make his plague the greater.
[Exit Bagot.]
ACT II.
[Enter Chorus.]
CHORUS.
Now, gentlemen, imagine that young Cromwell is
In Antwerp ledger for the English Merchants:
And Banister, to shun this Bagot's hate,
Hearing that he hath got some of his debts,
Is fled to Antwerp, with his wife and children;
Which Bagot hearing is gone after them:
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: three and forty years ago, the place was not entirely free from
race and color prejudice. The good influence of the Roaches,
Rodmans, Arnolds, Grinnells, and Robesons did not pervade all
classes of its people. The test of the real civilization of the
community came when I applied for work at my trade, and then my
repulse was emphatic and decisive. It so happened that Mr. Rodney
French, a wealthy and enterprising citizen, distinguished as an
anti-slavery man, was fitting out a vessel for a whaling voyage,
upon which there was a heavy job of calking and coppering to be
done. I had some skill in both branches, and applied to Mr. French
for work. He, generous man that he was, told me he would employ
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: his secret. His reluctance to lift the cover made Vitellius impatient.
"Break it in!" he cried to his lictors. Mannaeus heard the command,
and, seeing a lictor step forward armed with a hatchet, he feared that
the man intended to behead Iaokanann. He stayed the hand of the lictor
after the first blow, and then slipped between the heavy lid and the
pavement a kind of hook. He braced his long, lean arms, raised the
cover slowly, and in a moment it lay flat upon the stones. The
bystanders admired the strength of the old man.
Under the bronze lid was a wooden trap-door of the same size. At a
blow of the fist it folded back, allowing a wide hole to be seen, the
mouth of an immense pit, with a flight of winding steps leading down
Herodias |
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 Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: preserve its purity amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at
thirty, an old man, his stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy,
will be held, according to certain leisured philosophers, to be
happier than the huckster is. The one perishes in a breath, and the
other by degrees. From his eight industries, from the labor of his
shoulders, his throat, his hands, from his wife and his business, the
one derives--as from so many farms--children, some thousands of
francs, and the most laborious happiness that has ever diverted the
heart of man. This fortune and these children, or the children who sum
up everything for him, become the prey of the world above, to which he
brings his ducats and his daughter or his son, reared at college, who,
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
