| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: and Eva, who had been stimulated, by the society of her young
cousin, to exertions beyond her strength, began to fail rapidly.
St. Clare was at last willing to call in medical advice,--a thing
from which he had always shrunk, because it was the admission of
an unwelcome truth.
But, for a day or two, Eva was so unwell as to be confined
to the house; and the doctor was called.
Marie St. Clare had taken no notice of the child's gradually
decaying health and strength, because she was completely absorbed
in studying out two or three new forms of disease to which she
believed she herself was a victim. It was the first principle of
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: would not have astonished a forest. The lofty trees, the copses,
the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass,
exist in a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses
of sudden apparitions of the invisible; that which is below
man distinguishes, through the mists, that which is beyond man;
and the things of which we living beings are ignorant there
meet face to face in the night. Nature, bristling and wild,
takes alarm at certain approaches in which she fancies that she
feels the supernatural. The forces of the gloom know each other,
and are strangely balanced by each other. Teeth and claws fear what
they cannot grasp. Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious appetites,
Les Miserables |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: Our earth hath then contracted stench and rot.
Seest thou not, also, that whoso arrive
In region far from fatherland and home
Are by the strangeness of the clime and waters
Distempered?- since conditions vary much.
For in what else may we suppose the clime
Among the Britons to differ from Aegypt's own
(Where totters awry the axis of the world),
Or in what else to differ Pontic clime
From Gades' and from climes adown the south,
On to black generations of strong men
Of The Nature of Things |
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 From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: of ten in all. How hot it was at the bottom of that long tube
of metal! They were half suffocated. But what delight!
What ecstasy! A table had been laid with six covers on the
massive stone which formed the bottom of the Columbiad, and
lighted by a jet of electric light resembling that of day itself.
Numerous exquisite dishes, which seemed to descend from heaven,
were placed successively before the guests, and the richest wines
of France flowed in profusion during this splendid repast, served
nine hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth!
The festival was animated, not to say somewhat noisy. Toasts flew
backward and forward. They drank to the earth and to her satellite,
From the Earth to the Moon |
