| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: lips, he has dealt a deadly wound to /her/, his wife in truth, whom he
forsook for a social chimera,--then he must either die or take refuge
in a materialistic, selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which
impassioned souls shrink in horror.
As for Mme. de Beauseant, she doubtless did not imagine that her
friend's despair could drive him to suicide, when he had drunk deep of
love for nine years. Possibly she may have thought that she alone was
to suffer. At any rate, she did quite rightly to refuse the most
humiliating of all positions; a wife may stoop for weighty social
reasons to a kind of compromise which a mistress is bound to hold in
abhorrence, for in the purity of her passion lies all its
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: laugh, and the situation was saved.
It was then that Von Gerhard proposed the thing that
set us staring at him in amused wonder. He came over and
stood looking down at us, his hands outspread upon the
big library table, his body bent forward in an attitude
of eager intentness. I remember thinking what wonderful
hands they were, true indexes of the man's character;
broad, white, surgeonly hands; the fingers almost square
at the tips. They were hands as different from those
slender, nervous, unsteady, womanly hands of Peter Orme
as any hands could be, I thought. They were hands made
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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 Lesson of the Master by Henry James: Overt himself feel for the moment scantly so.
"And the gentlemen?" Overt went on.
"Well, sir, one of them's General Fancourt."
"Ah yes, I know; thank you." General Fancourt was distinguished,
there was no doubt of that, for something he had done, or perhaps
even hadn't done - the young man couldn't remember which - some
years before in India. The servant went away, leaving the glass
doors open into the gallery, and Paul Overt remained at the head of
the wide double staircase, saying to himself that the place was
sweet and promised a pleasant visit, while he leaned on the
balustrade of fine old ironwork which, like all the other details,
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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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the stars
nor out of the pride of life, but as a still small voice within.
5. GOD IS WITHIN
God comes we know not whence, into the conflict of life. He works
in men and through men. He is a spirit, a single spirit and a
single person; he has begun and he will never end. He is the
immortal part and leader of mankind. He has motives, he has
characteristics, he has an aim. He is by our poor scales of
measurement boundless love, boundless courage, boundless generosity.
He is thought and a steadfast will. He is our friend and brother
and the light of the world. That briefly is the belief of the
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