| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: wanting in nicety and precision; but go a few steps off and the parts
fall into place; they take their proper form and detach themselves,--
the body turns, the limbs stand out, we feel the air circulating
around them.
"Nevertheless," he continued, sadly, "I am not satisfied; there are
moments when I have my doubts. Perhaps it would be better not to
sketch a single line. I ask myself if I ought not to grasp the figure
first by its highest lights, and then work down to the darker
portions. Is not that the method of the sun, divine painter of the
universe? O Nature, Nature! who has ever caught thee in thy flights?
Alas! the heights of knowledge, like the depths of ignorance, lead to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: begin dinner and wait. And, like some queen who, finding her people
gathered in the hall, looks down upon them, and descends among them,
and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion
and their prostration before her (Paul did not move a muscle but looked
straight before him as she passed) she went down, and crossed the hall
and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could
not say: their tribute to her beauty.
But she stopped. There was a smell of burning. Could they have let the
BOEUF EN DAUBE overboil? she wondered, pray heaven not! when the
great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that
all those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of
To the Lighthouse |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: in one leaf reduced to half its normal diameter, and a close
examination will show a small abrasion of the paper in the next
leaf exactly where the hole would have come if continued.
In the book quoted it is just as if there had been a race.
In the first ten leaves the weak worms are left behind;
in the second ten there are still forty-eight eaters;
these are reduced to thirty-one in the third ten, and to only
eighteen in the fourth ten. On folio 51 only six worms hold on,
and before folio 61 two of them have given in. Before reaching
folio 7, it is a neck and neck race between two sturdy gourmands,
each making a fine large hole, one of them being oval in shape.
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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 The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther: mother; but here He has (as we said ) hedged it about and protected it.
Therefore He also wishes us to honor it, and to maintain and conduct it
as a divine and blessed estate; because, in the first place, He has
instituted it before all others, and therefore created man and woman
separately (as is evident), not for lewdness, but that they should
[legitimately] live together, be fruitful, beget children, and nourish
and train them to the honor of God.
Therefore God has also most richly blessed this estate above all
others, and, in addition, has bestowed on it and wrapped up in it
everything in the world, to the end that this estate might be well and
richly provided for. Married life is therefore no jest or presumption;
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