| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: but the first woman we love is the whole of womanhood; her children
are ours, her interests are our interests, her sorrows our greatest
sorrow; we love her gown, the familiar things about her; we are more
grieved by a trifling loss of hers than if we knew we had lost
everything. This is the sacred love that makes us live in the being of
another; whereas later, alas! we draw another life into ours, and
require a woman to enrich our pauper spirit with her young soul.
I was now one of the household, and I knew for the first time an
infinite sweetness, which to a nature bruised as mine was like a bath
to a weary body; the soul is refreshed in every fibre, comforted to
its very depths. You will hardly understand me, for you are a woman,
The Lily of the Valley |
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: high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in
open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by
passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called
it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a practice
he found he could perfectly "work" without exciting remark; no one
was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was
moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine.
He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm
proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat
Avenue "officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at
eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been
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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 Phaedo by Plato: weakest in the hour of death. For Nature, like a kind mother or nurse,
lays us to sleep without frightening us; physicians, who are the witnesses
of such scenes, say that under ordinary circumstances there is no fear of
the future. Often, as Plato tells us, death is accompanied 'with
pleasure.' (Tim.) When the end is still uncertain, the cry of many a one
has been, 'Pray, that I may be taken.' The last thoughts even of the best
men depend chiefly on the accidents of their bodily state. Pain soon
overpowers the desire of life; old age, like the child, is laid to sleep
almost in a moment. The long experience of life will often destroy the
interest which mankind have in it. So various are the feelings with which
different persons draw near to death; and still more various the forms in
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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 A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: fruitage of her patriotic labors was as rich as even she could
desire.
Cathy is a sufficiently good little scholar, for her nine years;
her mother taught her Spanish herself, and kept it always fresh
upon her ear and her tongue by hardly ever speaking with her in any
other tongue; her father was her English teacher, and talked with
her in that language almost exclusively; French has been her
everyday speech for more than seven years among her playmates here;
she has a good working use of governess - German and Italian. It
is true that there is always a faint foreign fragrance about her
speech, no matter what language she is talking, but it is only just
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