| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children
screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery
which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so
awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the
lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from
the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of
his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I
have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a
Black Veil!"
While his auditors shrank from one another, in mutual affright,
Father Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse, with a
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: him to our own tents. Be but your lordship present at his
examination; if he do not, for the promise of his life, and in
the highest compulsion of base fear, offer to betray you, and
deliver all the intelligence in his power against you, and that
with the divine forfeit of his soul upon oath, never trust my
judgment in anything.
SECOND LORD.
O, for the love of laughter, let him fetch his drum; he says he
has a stratagem for't: when your lordship sees the bottom of his
success in't, and to what metal this counterfeit lump of ore will
be melted, if you give him not John Drum's entertainment, your
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: were the same; he had wandered down to the beach alone,
very late, and he stood looking at the duskily-tumbling sea.
Suddenly the same voice that had spoken before murmured
another phrase in the darkness, and it rang upon his ear
for the rest of the night. It startled him, as I have said,
at first; then, the next morning, it led him to take his
departure for Paris. During the journey it lingered in his ear;
he sat in the corner of the railway-carriage with his eyes
closed, abstracted, on purpose to prolong the reverberation.
If it were not true it was at least, as the Italians have it,
ben trovato, and it was wonderful how well it bore thinking of.
|
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 Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: the ocean, and reserve to myself the more difficult
and illustrious province of preserving the connubial
compact from violation, and setting mankind free for
ever from the danger of suppositious children, and the
torment of fruitless vigilance and anxious suspicion.
To defraud any man of his due praise is unworthy
of a philosopher; I shall therefore openly confess,
that I owe the first hint of this inestimable secret
to the Rabbi Abraham Ben Hannase, who, in his
treatise of precious stones, has left this account of
the magnet: , &c. "The calamita, or
|
