| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: voice, "no one is more guiltless than I of the blood shed----"
"I am bound to believe you," said the priest. He paused a moment, and
again he scrutinized his penitent. But, persisting in the idea that
the man before him was one of the members of the Convention, one of
the voters who betrayed an inviolable and anointed head to save their
own, he began again gravely:
"Remember, my son, that it is not enough to have taken no active part
in the great crime; that fact does not absolve you. The men who might
have defended the King and left their swords in their scabbards, will
have a very heavy account to render to the King of Heaven--Ah! yes,"
he added, with an eloquent shake of the head, "heavy indeed!--for by
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: could escape from the council-board or audience-chamber, he would
run down the great staircase, with its lions of gilt bronze and its
steps of bright porphyry, and wander from room to room, and from
corridor to corridor, like one who was seeking to find in beauty an
anodyne from pain, a sort of restoration from sickness.
Upon these journeys of discovery, as he would call them - and,
indeed, they were to him real voyages through a marvellous land, he
would sometimes be accompanied by the slim, fair-haired Court
pages, with their floating mantles, and gay fluttering ribands; but
more often he would be alone, feeling through a certain quick
instinct, which was almost a divination, that the secrets of art
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: The music, we suppose, (as in ourselves)
Goes on forever there, behind shut doors,--
As it continues after our departure,
So, we divine, it played before we came . . .
What do you know of me, or I of you? . . .
Little enough. . . .We set these doors ajar
Only for chosen movements of the music:
This passage, (so I think--yet this is guesswork)
Will please him,--it is in a strain he fancies,--
More brilliant, though, than his; and while he likes it
He will be piqued . . . He looks at me bewildered
|
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 Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: figure of the foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in
an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads.
Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers,
and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of Dosso
Dossi's Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in closely fluted
lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak. Above her high
forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil;
one hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an
inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown
and sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of
wine from a high-poised flagon. At the lady's feet lay the
|
