| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: providence had directed me."
M. des Amis gripped him by the shoulders, and looked into his face.
"Is this true, my friend?" he asked.
"Not a word of it," said Andre-Louis, wrecking his chances on an
irresistible impulse to say the unexpected. But he didn't wreck
them. M. des Amis burst into laughter; and having laughed his fill,
confessed himself charmed by his applicant's fundamental honesty.
"Take off your coat," he said, "and let us see what you can do.
Nature, at least, designed you for a swordsman. You are light,
active, and supple, with a good length of arm, and you seem
intelligent. I may make something of you, teach you enough for my
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: thus, she took the ugliest of her monsters, full glutted from her
spleen, and flung it invisibly into his mouth, which, flying
straight up into his head, squeezed out his eye-balls, gave him a
distorted look, and half-overturned his brain. Then she privately
ordered two of her beloved children, Dulness and Ill-manners,
closely to attend his person in all encounters. Having thus
accoutred him, she vanished in a mist, and the hero perceived it
was the goddess his mother.
The destined hour of fate being now arrived, the fight began;
whereof, before I dare adventure to make a particular description,
I must, after the example of other authors, petition for a hundred
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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 Timaeus by Plato: both of man and of the universe has been already acknowledged. We cannot
tell (nor could Plato himself have told) where the figure or myth ends and
the philosophical truth begins; we cannot explain (nor could Plato himself
have explained to us) the relation of the ideas to appearance, of which one
is the copy of the other, and yet of all things in the world they are the
most opposed and unlike. This opposition is presented to us in many forms,
as the antithesis of the one and many, of the finite and infinite, of the
intelligible and sensible, of the unchangeable and the changing, of the
indivisible and the divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the
creative mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many
aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena--they easily
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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 Caesar's Commentaries in Latin by Julius Caesar: constituerunt optimum esse domum suam quemque reverti, et quorum in fines
primum Romani exercitum introduxissent, ad eos defendendos undique
convenirent, ut potius in suis quam in alienis finibus decertarent et
domesticis copiis rei frumentariae uterentur. Ad eam sententiam cum
reliquis causis haec quoque ratio eos deduxit, quod Diviciacum atque
Haeduos finibus Bellovacorum adpropinquare cognoverant. His persuaderi ut
diutius morarentur neque suis auxilium terrent non poterat.
Ea re constituta, secunda vigilia magno cum, strepitu ac tumultu
castris egressi nullo certo ordine neque imperio, cum sibi quisque primum
itineris locum peteret et domum pervenire properaret, fecerunt ut
consimilis fugae profectio videretur. Hac re statim Caesar per
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