| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: From death defended though by men forsaken,
The bread that every man must eat alone;
He may have walked while others hardly dared
Look on to see him stand where many fell;
And upward out of that, as out of hell,
He may have sung and striven
To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat, --
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: secretary with him into retirement only to bring him back on his
return; otherwise he puts him to grass in some of the various
administrative pastures,--for instance, in the Court of Exchequer,
that wayside refuge where private secretaries wait for the storm to
blow over. The young man is not precisely a government official; he is
a political character, however; and sometimes his politics are limited
to those of one man. When we think of the number of letters it is the
private secretary's fate to open and read, besides all his other
avocations, it is very evident that under a monarchical government his
services would be well paid for. A drudge of this kind costs ten or
twenty thousand francs a year; and he enjoys, moreover, the opera-
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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 Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: vital movement of the people's has worked down, for good or
evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.
Think back through history, and you will know it. What will
this lowest deep--thieves, Magdalens, negroes--do with the light
filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian theories,
Goethe schemes? Some day, out of their bitter need will be
thrown up their own light-bringer,--their Jean Paul, their
Cromwell, their Messiah."
"Bah!" was the Doctor's inward criticism. However, in practice,
he adopted the theory; for, when, night and morning, afterwards,
he prayed that power might be given these degraded souls to
Life in the Iron-Mills |
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 Gambara by Honore de Balzac: avoid that blunder. A picture in which there were no colors but blue
and red would be untrue to nature, and fatigue the eye. And thus the
constantly recurring rhythm in the score of /Robert le Diable/ makes
the work, as a whole, appear monotonous. As to the effect of the long
trumpets, of which you speak, it has long been known in Germany; and
what Meyerbeer offers us as a novelty was constantly used by Mozart,
who gives just such a chorus to the devils in /Don Giovanni/."
By plying Gambara, meanwhile, with fresh libations, Andrea thus
strove, by his contradictoriness, to bring the musician back to a true
sense of music, by proving to him that his so-called mission was not
to try to regenerate an art beyond his powers, but to seek to express
Gambara |
