| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: There."
Floating downward through the abysses, they re-entered the dust of the
lesser worlds, and saw the Earth, like a subterranean cavern, suddenly
illuminated to their eyes by the light which their souls brought with
them, and which still environed them in a cloud of the paling
harmonies of heaven. The sight was that which of old struck the inner
eyes of Seers and Prophets. Ministers of all religions, Preachers of
all pretended truths, Kings consecrated by Force and Terror, Warriors
and Mighty men apportioning the Peoples among them, the Learned and
the Rich standing above the suffering, noisy crowd, and noisily
grinding them beneath their feet,--all were there, accompanied by
Seraphita |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: poured through their ears, when they are still at a distance from the truth
of facts, by exhibiting to them fictitious arguments, and making them think
that they are true, and that the speaker is the wisest of men in all
things?
THEAETETUS: Yes; why should there not be another such art?
STRANGER: But as time goes on, and their hearers advance in years, and
come into closer contact with realities, and have learnt by sad experience
to see and feel the truth of things, are not the greater part of them
compelled to change many opinions which they formerly entertained, so that
the great appears small to them, and the easy difficult, and all their
dreamy speculations are overturned by the facts of life?
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: Severine made her husband happy in his own way. He liked good living
and everything easy about him; she supplied him with the choicest
wines, a table worthy of a bishop, served by the best cook in the
department but without the pretensions of luxury; for she kept her
household strictly to the conditions of the burgher life of Arcis. It
was a proverb in Arcis that you must dine with Madame Beauvisage and
spend your evening with Madame Marion.
The renewed influence in the arrondissement of Arcis which the
Restoration gave to the house of Cinq-Cygne had naturally drawn closer
the ties that bound together the various families affected by the
criminal trial relating to the abduction of Gondreville. [See "An
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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 Walden by Henry David Thoreau: on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe --
sporting there alone -- and to need none but the morning and the
ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the
earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its
kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it
seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the
crevice of a crag; -- or was its native nest made in the angle of a
cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and
lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry
now some cliffy cloud.
Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright
Walden |
