| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: miserable and perfectly healthy, which disposes of the ugly
notion that has at times disturbed me that my happiness
here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
And while we were wasting our lives there, here was
this dear place with dandelions up to the very door,
all the paths grass-grown and completely effaced, in winter
so lonely, with nobody but the north wind taking the least
notice of it, and in May--in all those five lovely Mays--
no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more
wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing,
the virginia creeper <6> madder every year, until at last,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: immediately remarked, and whispered from one to another, that
he and I had the only red sashes in the room, - and they were
both of the hue of blood, sir, blood. He shook hands with
myself and all the members of my family. Then the cream
came, and I found myself in the same set of a quadrille with
his honour. We dance here in Apia a most fearful and
wonderful quadrille, I don't know where the devil they fished
it from; but it is rackety and prancing and embraceatory
beyond words; perhaps it is best defined in Haggard's
expression of a gambado. When I and my great enemy found
ourselves involved in this gambol, and crossing hands, and
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: "She was right! He is here! 'Felix, Felix, Felix has come!' she kept
crying. My dear friend," he continued, beside himself with terror,
"death is here. Why did it not take a poor madman like me with one
foot in the grave?"
I walked towards the house summoning my courage, but on the threshold
of the long antechamber which crossed the house and led to the lawn,
the Abbe Birotteau stopped me.
"Madame la comtesse begs you will not enter at present," he said to
me.
Giving a glance within the house I saw the servants coming and going,
all busy, all dumb with grief, surprised perhaps by the orders Manette
The Lily of the Valley |
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 Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: three or four large mansions in the Rue de Bondy.
Topinard's apartment consisted of a kitchen and two bedrooms. The
first was a nursery with two little deal bedsteads and a cradle in it,
the second was the bedroom, and the kitchen did duty as a dining-room.
Above, reached by a short ladder, known among builders as a "trap-
ladder," there was a kind of garret, six feet high, with a sash-window
let into the roof. This room, given as a servants' bedroom, raised the
Topinards' establishment from mere "rooms" to the dignity of a
tenement, and the rent to a corresponding sum of four hundred francs.
An arched lobby, lighted from the kitchen by a small round window, did
duty as an ante-chamber, and filled the space between the bedroom, the
|
