| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: her.
"Only five hundred feet from the bridge. We are now going to cross the
Beresina, Stephanie, and once across I will not torment you any more;
you shall sleep; we shall be in safety, and can reach Wilna easily.--
God grant that she may never know what her life has cost!" he thought.
"Philippe! you are wounded!"
"That is nothing."
Too late! the fatal hour had come. The Russian cannon sounded the
reveille. Masters of Studzianka, they could sweep the plain, and by
daylight the major could see two of their columns moving and forming
on the heights. A cry of alarm arose from the multitude, who started
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: center of the clearing, but their bark was rubbed away, and the
white wood beneath showed all shiny and polished in the patches of
moonlight. There were creepers hanging from the upper branches,
and the bells of the flowers of the creepers, great waxy white
things like convolvuluses, hung down fast asleep. But within the
limits of the clearing there was not a single blade of green--
nothing but the trampled earth.
The moonlight showed it all iron gray, except where some
elephants stood upon it, and their shadows were inky black.
Little Toomai looked, holding his breath, with his eyes starting
out of his head, and as he looked, more and more and more
The Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: history. Apart from several brief studies, not always reliable, the
net result of his many years' application to his scholarly projects
was this brief epic in prose, Homeric in mood. The sense of intense
living, "living dangerously"--to use a phrase of Nietzsche's, the
recognition of courage as the greatest of all virtues--the God in man,
inspired Gogol, living in an age which tended toward grey tedium, with
admiration for his more fortunate forefathers, who lived in "a poetic
time, when everything was won with the sword, when every one in his
turn strove to be an active being and not a spectator." Into this
short work he poured all his love of the heroic, all his romanticism,
all his poetry, all his joy. Its abundance of life bears one along
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
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 Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: glance and gesture, believing there could be no danger near so old a
fellow, in such wise that Blanche--naive and nice as she was in
contradistinction to the girls of Touraine, who are as wide-awake as a
spring morning--permitted the good man first to kiss her hand, and
afterwards her neck, rather low-down; at least so said the archbishop
who married them the week after; and that was a beautiful bridal, and
a still more beautiful bride.
The said Blanche was slender and graceful as no other girl, and still
better than that, more maidenly than ever maiden was; a maiden all
ignorant of love, who knew not why or what it was; a maiden who
wondered why certain people lingered in their beds; a maiden who
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
