| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: evolved in a swarm; one brings another; they come linked together;
they vie with each other; they fly in clouds, wild and headlong.
Again, they rise up pallid and misty, and perish for want of strength
or of nutrition; the vital force is lacking. Or again, on certain
days, they rush down into the depths to light up that immense
obscurity; they terrify us and leave the soul dejected.
"Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom,
a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by
some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.
"Yes, within us and without, everything testifies to the livingness of
those exquisite creations, which I compare with flowers in obedience
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: the sooner the better.
BOLINGBROKE.
Patience, good lady, wizards know their times:
Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night,
The time of night when Troy was set on fire,
The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl
And spirits walk and ghosts break up their graves,
That time best fits the work we have in hand.
Madam, sit you and fear not; whom we raise,
We will make fast within a hallow'd verge.
[Here they do the ceremonies belonging, and make the circle;
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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 Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The features of a face.
IPPOLITO.
And you have had
The honor, nay, the glory, of portraying
Julia Gonzaga! Do you count as nothing
A privilege like that? See there the portrait
Rebuking you with its divine expression.
Are you not penitent? He whose skilful hand
Painted that lovely picture has not right
To vilipend the art of portrait-painting.
But what of Michael Angelo?
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: fair to make Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations.
It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possibilities
of her future. Her own physical capacities, as the great mind of
Napoleon saw, are what they always have been, inexhaustible; and science
has learnt to set at naught the only defect of situation which has ever
injured her prosperity, namely, the short land passage from the Nile to
the Red Sea. The fate of Palestine is now more than ever bound up with
her fate; and a British or French colony might, holding the two
countries, develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from
Alexander's handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the
nations of the West and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem
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