| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: conflict and he lived the strenuous life.
How this sinister mark came to him, he never knew. Indeed it is not
likely that he had any idea of the part that it played in his
career. The attitude that the world took toward him from the
beginning, an attitude of aggressive mistrust,--the role that he was
expected and practically forced to assume in the drama of existence,
the role of a hero of interminable strife,--must have seemed to him
altogether mysterious and somewhat absurd. But his part was fixed
by the black patch. It gave him an aspect so truculent and
forbidding that all the elements of warfare gathered around him as
hornets around a sugar barrel, and his appearance in public was like
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: awkwardness, that she contented herself with calling it. He had at
any rate ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left
something a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday. During
the three months of his happy survival at Cocker's after her
consent to their engagement she had often asked herself what it was
marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that seemed already
to have scraped the platter so clean. Opposite there, behind the
counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more
clustering curls and more present, too present, H's had been for a
couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro
before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: Mr. Hunt loitered in his course, to get rid of such doubtful
fellow-travellers. Certain it is that he felt a sensation of
relief as he saw the whole crew, the renegade Rose and all,
disappear among the windings of the mountain, and heard the last
yelp of the savages die away in the distance.
When they were fairly out of sight, and out of hearing, he
encamped on the head waters of the little stream of the preceding
day, having come about sixteen miles. Here he remained all the
succeeding day, as well to give time for the Crows to get in the
advance, as for the stragglers, who had wandered away in quest of
water two days previously, to rejoin the camp. Indeed,
|
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 Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: moment, only to be annulled later on. And, therefore, so far from co-
operating with the King to bring about a new condition of things, the
Marquis d'Esgrignon stood aloof, an upholder of the straitest sect of
the Right in politics, until such time as his vast fortune should be
restored to him. Nor did he so much as admit the thought of the
indemnity which filled the minds of the Villele ministry, and formed a
part of a design of strengthening the Crown by putting an end to those
fatal distinctions of ownership which still lingered on in spite of
legislation.
The miracles of the Restoration of 1814, the still greater miracle of
Napoleon's return in 1815, the portents of a second flight of the
|
