| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm: and the head answers:
'Bride, bride, there thou gangest!
Alas! alas! if they mother knew it,
Sadly, sadly, would she rue it.'
And Curdken went on telling the king what had happened upon the meadow
where the geese fed; how his hat was blown away; and how he was forced
to run after it, and to leave his flock of geese to themselves. But
the old king told the boy to go out again the next day: and when
morning came, he placed himself behind the dark gate, and heard how
she spoke to Falada, and how Falada answered. Then he went into the
field, and hid himself in a bush by the meadow's side; and he soon saw
Grimm's Fairy Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find
growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of
the thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate instinct
by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had been
such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable
species, that the production was no longer of God's making, but
the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with
only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of
experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in mingling
plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the
questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole
Mosses From An Old Manse |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled mustache, and he
was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart in his
voice, the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann. He saw
Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When
Byrne would have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.
"It is only the Portier from the lodge," she said.
The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering
note, stood before Harmony, bowing.
"The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad," he said thickly.
"There is no more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier
from Salzburg who has only one lung."
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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 A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of
equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote
puts La Palferine's genius before you in all its vivacity and
completeness. He realizes Pascal's /entre-deux/, he comprehends the
whole scale between tenderness and pitilessness, and, like
Epaminondas, he is equally great in extremes. And not merely so, his
epigram stamps the epoch; the /accoucheur/ is a modern innovation. All
the refinements of modern civilization are summed up in the phrase. It
is monumental."
"Look here, my dear Nathan, what farrago of nonsense is this?" asked
the Marquise in bewilderment.
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