| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: jealous.
"Until to-morrow," she said to me, as she left the ball about two
o'clock in the morning.
"I won't go," I thought. "I give up. You are a thousand times more
capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination."
The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty
little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet,
looking up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft
light. It was one of those evenings which delight the soul, one of
those moments which are never forgotten, one of those hours passed in
peace and longing, whose charm is always in later years a source of
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their
effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come
to rest. They hover over the meadows poised. A
movement would startle them to flight; only the
proper movement somehow never comes.
The great redwoods, too, add to the colored-
edition impression of the whole country. A redwood,
as perhaps you know, is a tremendous big tree sometimes
as big as twenty feet in diameter. It is exquisitely
proportioned like a fluted column of noble
height. Its bark is slightly furrowed longitudinally, and
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: fetters.
But, if those thoughts brought delight, it was a painful, troubled
pleasure, too near akin to anguish; and one that did me more injury
than I was aware of. It was an indulgence that a person of more
wisdom or more experience would doubtless have denied herself. And
yet, how dreary to turn my eyes from the contemplation of that
bright object and force them to dwell on the dull, grey, desolate
prospect around: the joyless, hopeless, solitary path that lay
before me. It was wrong to be so joyless, so desponding; I should
have made God my friend, and to do His will the pleasure and the
business of my life; but faith was weak, and passion was too
Agnes Grey |
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 Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: Scotland, as having suggested an idea for the tower called Wolf's
Crag, which the public more generally identified with the ancient
tower of Fast Castle.]
The scraps of poetry which have been in most cases tacked to the
beginning of chapters in these Novels are sometimes quoted either
from reading or from memory, but, in the general case, are pure
invention. I found it too troublesome to turn to the collection
of the British Poets to discover apposite mottoes, and, in the
situation of the theatrical mechanist, who, when the white paper
which represented his shower of snow was exhausted, continued the
storm by snowing brown, I drew on my memory as long as I could,
|
