| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: rustic-looking house door, and three dormer windows in the roof--a
slate roof with two gables, prodigiously high-pitched in proportion to
the low ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color;
and door, and first-floor shutters, all the Venetian shutters of the
attic windows, all are painted green.
Entering the house, you find yourself in a little lobby with a crooked
staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure,
the spiral balusters are brown with age, and the steps themselves take
a new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled dining-
room, floored with square white tiles from Chateau-Regnault, is on
your right; to the left is the sitting-room, equally large, but here
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: SOCRATES: Do you hear him, Laches?
LACHES: Yes, I hear him, but I do not very well understand him.
SOCRATES: I think that I understand him; and he appears to me to mean that
courage is a sort of wisdom.
LACHES: What can he possibly mean, Socrates?
SOCRATES: That is a question which you must ask of himself.
LACHES: Yes.
SOCRATES: Tell him then, Nicias, what you mean by this wisdom; for you
surely do not mean the wisdom which plays the flute?
NICIAS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: Nor the wisdom which plays the lyre?
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: jests before. His first move was to search hither and
thither for the constables, there were two in the town,
shrivelled men whom he ultimately found in hiding up an
alley yet more shrivelled than usual, having some not
ungrounded fears that they might be roughly handled if seen.
"What can we two poor lammigers do against such a
multitude!" expostulated Stubberd, in answer to Mr. Grower's
chiding. "'Tis tempting 'em to commit felo-de-se upon
us, and that would be the death of the perpetrator; and we
wouldn't be the cause of a fellow-creature's death on no
account, not we!"
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
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 Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: in?
You can see the long hotel piazza, with the gossipy groups of
wooden chairs standing vacant in the early afternoon; for the
grown-up people are dallying with the ultimate nuts and raisins of
their mid-day dinner. A villainous clatter of innumerable little
vegetable-dishes comes from the open windows of the pantry as the
boy steals past the kitchen end of the house, with Horace's
lightest bamboo pole over his shoulder, and a little brother in
skirts and short white stockings tagging along behind him.
When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of
the field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method
|
