| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: In a soft under-current of sound.
The indictment had never been clearly expressed,
And it seemed that the Snark had begun,
And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed
What the pig was supposed to have done.
The Jury had each formed a different view
(Long before the indictment was read),
And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew
One word that the others had said.
"You must know ---" said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed "Fudge!"
That statute is obsolete quite!
The Hunting of the Snark |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: came back. "Yet how did you know - ?"
"I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember - and you had
sent no word."
"Yes, I remember - I was to have gone to you at one to-day." It
caught on to their "old" life and relation - which were so near and
so far. "I was still out there in my strange darkness - where was
it, what was it? I must have stayed there so long." He could but
wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.
"Since last night?" she asked with a shade of fear for her possible
indiscretion.
"Since this morning - it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: of Order, i. e., under a Social, not a Political title; as
representatives of the bourgeois social system; not as knights of
traveling princesses, but as the bourgeois class against the other
classes; not as royalists against republicans. Indeed, as party of
Order they exercised a more unlimited and harder dominion over the other
classes of society than ever before either under the restoration or the
July monarchy-a thing possible only under the form of a parliamentary
republic, because under this form alone could the two large divisions of
the French bourgeoisie be united; in other words, only under this form
could they place on the order of business the sovereignty of their
class, in lieu of the regime of a privileged faction of the same. If,
|
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 Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: love and M. de Bargeton's weakness, that as the rooms filled, he
assumed a lordly air, which that fair lady encouraged. He tasted the
delights of despotic sway which Nais had acquired by right of
conquest, and liked to share with him; and, in short, that evening he
tried to act up to the part of the lion of the little town. A few of
those who marked these airs drew their own conclusions from them, and
thought that, according to the old expression, he had come to the last
term with the lady. Amelie, who had come with M. du Chatelet, was sure
of the deplorable fact, in a corner of the drawing-room, where the
jealous and envious gathered together.
"Do not think of calling Nais to account for the vanity of a
|
