| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: put a 'P'* on the bills, and I shall live comfortably in Italy for the
rest of my days as the Conte Ferraro. [*Protested.] I was alone with
him when he died, poor fellow, in the marsh of Zembin, and I shall
slip into his skin. . . . Mille diables! the woman who is to follow
after me might give them a clue! Think of an old campaigner like me
infatuated enough to tie myself to a petticoat tail! . . . Why take
her? I must leave her behind. Yes, I could make up my mind to it;
but--I know myself--I should be ass enough to go back to her. Still,
nobody knows Aquilina. Shall I take her or leave her?"
"You will not take her!" cried a voice that filled Castanier with
sickening dread. He turned sharply, and saw the Englishman.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: defence, without which so savoury a morsel as the mollusc within
(cooked and eaten largely on some parts of our south coast) would
be a staple article of food for sea-beasts of prey. And it is
noteworthy, first, that the defensive thorns which are permanent on
the two thinner species, aculeatum and echinatum, disappear
altogether on the thicker one, tuberculatum, as old age gives him a
solid and heavy globose shell; and next, that he too, while young
and tender, and liable therefore to be bored through by whelks and
such murderous univalves, does actually possess the same briar-
prickles, which his thinner cousins keep throughout life.
Nevertheless, prickles, in all three species, are, as far as we can
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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 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: amongst the Romans;--Pantenus and Clemens Alexandrinus and Montaigne
amongst the Christians; and a score and a half of good, honest, unthinking
Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can't recollect,--all
pretended that their jerkins were made after this fashion,--you might have
rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased, and fretted and fridged the
outside of them all to pieces;--in short, you might have played the very
devil with them, and at the same time, not one of the insides of them would
have been one button the worse, for all you had done to them.
I believe in my conscience that mine is made up somewhat after this sort:--
for never poor jerkin has been tickled off at such a rate as it has been
these last nine months together,--and yet I declare, the lining to it,--as
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: idea of the Logos, of the Deity working in time and space by successive
thoughts--he had not heard of; for it was dead, as I have said, in
Alexandria itself; and if he had heard of it, he would have spurned it
as detracting from the absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom
he so nobly yet so partially bore witness. So it was to be; doubtless
it was right that it should be so. Man's eye is too narrow to see a
whole truth, his brain too weak to carry a whole truth. Better for him,
and better for the world, is perhaps the method on which man has been
educated in every age, by which to each school, or party, or nation, is
given some one great truth, which they are to work out to its highest
development, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age--
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