| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: Let me take up this matter; let me look into the life and habits of
this man,--find out if he is kind, or bad-tempered, or gentle, if he
commands the respect which you merit in a husband, if he is able to
love utterly, preferring you to everything, even his own talent--"
"What does that signify if I love him?"
"Ah, true!" cried the dwarf.
At that instant Madame Mignon was saying to her friends,--
"My daughter saw the man she loves this morning."
"Then it must have been that sulphur waistcoat which puzzled you so,
Latournelle," said his wife. "The young man had a pretty white rose in
his buttonhole."
Modeste Mignon |
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 House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands
a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing
towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered
chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house
is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference,
rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by
the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my occasional visits to the
town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street,
for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities,
--the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like
House of Seven Gables |
