| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past
like a piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations
the sun poured its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as
solid on the swift surface of the stream as on the stable meadows.
The light sparkled golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought
the hills into communion with our eyes. And all the while the
river never stopped running or took breath; and the reeds along the
whole valley stood shivering from top to toe.
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded
on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature
more striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: a question of making him mayor of Alencon; but the memory of his
underhand jobbery still clung to him, and he was never received at the
prefecture. All the succeeding governments, even that of the Hundred
Days, refused to appoint him mayor of Alencon,--a place he coveted,
which, could he have had it, would, he thought, have won him the hand
of a certain old maid on whom his matrimonial views now turned.
Du Bousquier's aversion to the Imperial government had thrown him at
first into the royalist circles of Alencon, where he remained in spite
of the rebuffs he received there; but when, after the first return of
the Bourbons, he was still excluded from the prefecture, that
mortification inspired him with a hatred as deep as it was secret
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