| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adam Bede by George Eliot: he said at last, looking down at Hetty; "it is so much prettier as
well as shorter than coming by either of the lodges."
"Yes, sir," Hetty answered, with a tremulous, almost whispering
voice. She didn't know one bit how to speak to a gentleman like
Mr. Arthur, and her very vanity made her more coy of speech.
"Do you come every week to see Mrs. Pomfret?"
"Yes, sir, every Thursday, only when she's got to go out with Miss
Donnithorne."
"And she's teaching you something, is she?"
"Yes, sir, the lace-mending as she learnt abroad, and the
stocking-mending--it looks just like the stocking, you can't tell
Adam Bede |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: offer her a proper price. She had had the luck to please, she said, an
English lord, and she wanted to get rid of all her property and look
poor, so that he might give her a fine house and furniture, fit to
rival the Rothschilds. But in spite of these persuasions and
subterfuges, all the dealers would offer her for a mass of belongings
worth a hundred and fifty thousand was seventy thousand. Florine
thereupon offered to deliver over everything in eight days for eighty
thousand,--"To take or leave," she said,--and the bargain was
concluded. After the men had departed she skipped for joy, like the
hills of King David, and performed all manner of follies, not having
thought herself so rich.
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: hearers to consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his
great Scotch followers, we are not bound to believe them either
infallible, or altogether world-embracing; that there have been other
methods than theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground
from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely
a private vagary of their own, but one which has been accepted
undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so many different races,
as to give something of an inductive probability that it is not a mere
dream, but may be a right and true instinct of the human mind. I mean
the belief that the things which we see--nature and all her phenomena--
are temporal, and born only to die; mere shadows of some unseen
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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 Juana by Honore de Balzac: man, in the patience and gentleness shown on all occasions by his
wife; but that patience, that gentleness, were only the outward signs
of the resignation which had made her his wife. Resignation, religion,
were they love? Often Diard wished for refusal where he met with
chaste obedience; often he would have given his eternal life that
Juana might have wept upon his bosom and not disguised her secret
thoughts behind a smiling face which lied to him nobly. Many young men
--for after a certain age men no longer struggle--persist in the
effort to triumph over an evil fate, the thunder of which they hear,
from time to time, on the horizon of their lives; and when at last
they succumb and roll down the precipice of evil, we ought to do them
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