| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: Their waving foliage, eager for the freshness of the water, drooped
its tresses above the stream; the larches shook their light fringes
and played with the pines, stiff and motionless as aged men. This
luxuriant beauty was foiled by the solemn colonnades of the forest-
trees, rising in terraces upon the mountains, and by the calm sheet of
the fiord, lying below, where the torrent buried its fury and was
still. Beyond, the sea hemmed in this page of Nature, written by the
greatest of poets, Chance; to whom the wild luxuriance of creation
when apparently abandoned to itself is owing.
The village of Jarvis was a lost point in the landscape, in this
immensity of Nature, sublime at this moment like all things else of
Seraphita |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: Therefore they became in after years, not only the great
colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world--the most
practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the
parents of all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics.
Their very religion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward
their education, not in spite of, but by means of that
anthropomorphism which we sometimes too hastily decry. As Mr.
Gladstone says: "As regarded all other functions of our nature,
outside the domain of the life to Godward--all those functions
which are summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind,
the psychic and bodily life, the tendency of the system was to
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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 Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: rascalities. I encountered a chaplet or string of miserable and
unfortunate people, and did for them what my sense of duty demands
of me, and as for the rest be that as it may; and whoever takes
objection to it, saving the sacred dignity of the senor licentiate and
his honoured person, I say he knows little about chivalry and lies
like a whoreson villain, and this I will give him to know to the
fullest extent with my sword;" and so saying he settled himself in his
stirrups and pressed down his morion; for the barber's basin, which
according to him was Mambrino's helmet, he carried hanging at the
saddle-bow until he could repair the damage done to it by the galley
slaves.
Don Quixote |
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 Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: plain upon the handsome brow, and violence was in the mouth; but Padre
Ignacio liked the eyes. "He is not saying any prayers," he surmised,
presently. "I doubt if he has said any for a long while. And he knows my
music. He is of educated people. He cannot be American. And now--yes, he
has taken--I think it must be a flower, from his pocket. I shall have him
to dine with me." And vespers ended with rosy clouds of eagerness
drifting across the Padre's brain.
II
But the stranger made his own beginning. As the priest came from the
church, the rebellious young figure was waiting. "Your organist tells
me," he said, impetuously, "that it is you who--"
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