| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: in a new suit of clothes made of blue cloth, in which he looked like
the servant of some minister.
The sum which Paz deposited weekly on the mantel-piece, joined to
Malaga's meagre salary, gave her the means of sumptuous living
compared with her former poverty. Wonderful stories went the rounds of
the Circus about Malaga's good-luck. Her vanity increased the six
thousand francs which Paz had spent on her furniture to sixty
thousand. According to the clowns and the supers, Malaga was
squandering money; and she now appeared at the Circus wearing burnous
and shawls and elegant scarfs. The Pole, it was agreed on all sides,
was the best sort of man a circus-rider had ever encountered, not
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Love and Friendship by Jane Austen: all. "Louisa Clarke (said I) is in general a very pleasant Girl,
yet sometimes her good humour is clouded by Peevishness, Envy and
Spite. She neither wants Understanding or is without some
pretensions to Beauty, but these are so very trifling, that the
value she sets on her personal charms, and the adoration she
expects them to be offered are at once a striking example of her
vanity, her pride, and her folly." So said I, and to my opinion
everyone added weight by the concurrence of their own.
Your affectionate
Arabella Smythe.
THE FIRST ACT OF A COMEDY
Love and Friendship |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Egmont by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: their blessings through the still air; where, like earth-born giants, we
spring aloft, invigorated by our Mother's touch; where our entire humanity
and our human desires throb in every vein; where the desire to press
forward, to vanquish, to snatch, to use his clenched fist, to possess, to
conquer, glows through the soul of the young hunter; where the warrior,
with rapid stride, assumes his inborn right to dominion over the world;
and, with terrible liberty, sweeps like a desolating hailstorm over the field
and grove, knowing no boundaries traced by the hand of man.
Thou art but a shadow, a dream of the happiness I so long possessed;
where has treacherous fate conducted thee? Did she deny thee to meet the
rapid stroke of never-shunned death, in the open face of day, only to
Egmont |
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 Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: way of life, that he might have come ready dressed into the world. You
could no more imagine him apart from his clothes than you could think
of a bulb without its husk. If the old printer had not long since
given the measure of his blind greed, the very nature of the man came
out in the manner of his abdication.
Knowing, as he did, that his son must have learned his business pretty
thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he had yet been
ruminating for a long while over the bargain that he meant to drive
with David. All that the father made, the son, of course, was bound to
lose, but in business this worthy knew nothing of father or son. If,
in the first instance, he had looked on David as his only child, later
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