| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: more, and need sound sense to send them back again into their
place as things which are past for ever, for good and ill. But
what did you want to know?
Why, I am so tired of looking out of the window. It is all the
same: fields and hedges, hedges and fields; and I want to talk.
Fields and hedges, hedges and fields? Peace and plenty, plenty
and peace. However, it may seem dull, now that the grass is cut;
but you would not have said so two months ago, when the fields
were all golden-green with buttercups, and the whitethorn hedges
like crested waves of snow. I should like to take a foreigner
down the Vale of Berkshire in the end of May, and ask him what he
|
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 Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: question you have put to me.
As I have not the honor of knowing you personally, and yet am
bound to you, in a measure, by the ties of poetic communion, I am
unwilling to offer any commonplace compliments. Perhaps you have
already won a malicious victory by thus embarrassing a maker of
books.
The young man was certainly not wanting in the sort of shrewdness
which is permissible to a man of honor. By return courier he received
an answer:--
To Monsieur de Canalis,--You grow more and more sensible, my dear
poet. My father is a count. The chief glory of our house was a
Modeste Mignon |
