| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: these, the deeply searching glance a man turns on his fellows as
he mounts the last step of the scaffold. Life so dilated in this
fragment of life that Don Juan shrank back; he walked up and down
the room, he dared not meet that gaze, but he saw nothing else.
The ceiling and the hangings, the whole room was sown with living
points of fire and intelligence. Everywhere those gleaming eyes
haunted him.
"He might very likely have lived another hundred years!" he cried
involuntarily. Some diabolical influence had drawn him to his
father, and again he gazed at that luminous spark. The eyelid
closed and opened again abruptly; it was like a woman's sign of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: man's intentions should be leniently judged. Castanier had just
cleverness enough to be very shrewd where his own interests were
concerned. So he concluded to be a philanthropist on either count, and
at first made her his mistress.
"Hey! hey!" he said to himself, in his soldierly fashion. "I am an old
wolf, and a sheep shall not make a fool of me. Castanier, old man,
before you set up housekeeping, reconnoitre the girl's character for a
bit, and see if she is a steady sort."
This irregular union gave the Piedmontese a status the most nearly
approaching respectability among those which the world declines to
recognize. During the first year she took the nom de guerre of
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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 Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: half green, and created an enormous quantity of smoke, which came
rolling towards me like a curtain, lying very low on account of the
wind. Presently, above the crackling of the fire, I heard a startled
roar, then another and another. So the lions were at home.
"I was beginning to get excited now, for, as you fellows know, there is
nothing in experience to warm up your nerves like a lion at close
quarters, unless it is a wounded buffalo; and I became still more so
when I made out through the smoke that the lions were all moving about
on the extreme edge of the reeds. Occasionally they would pop their
heads out like rabbits from a burrow, and then, catching sight of me
standing about fifty yards away, draw them back again. I knew that it
Long Odds |
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 Youth by Joseph Conrad: London. Do or Die.'
"O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the
imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap
carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight--to
me she was the endeavor, the test, the trial of life. I
think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret--
as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I
shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle.
"One night when tied to the mast, as I explained, we
were pumping on, deafened with the wind, and without
spirit enough in us to wish ourselves dead, a heavy sea
Youth |
