| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes
Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged
upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley
set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town
flutter in the breeze at its high windows. And then,
upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture! In this
one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily
forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind
another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in
almost every style upon the globe. Egyptian and Greek
temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: at us? You are wise, and I can tell you what I think; you know so much
you can explain all. I feel a sort of force within me that wants to
exercise itself; I struggle against something. When the sky is gray I
am half content; I am sad, but I am calm. When the day is fine, and
the flowers smell sweet, and I sit on my bench down there among the
jasmine and honeysuckles, something rises in me, like waves which beat
against my stillness. Ideas come into my mind which shake me, and fly
away like those birds before the windows; I cannot hold them. Well,
when I have made a bouquet in which the colors blend like tapestry,
and the red contrasts with white, and the greens and the browns cross
each other, when all seems so abundant, the breeze so playful, the
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: Neuer shed
Thes. What are they that do play it?
Ege. Hard handed men, that worke in Athens heere,
Which neuer labour'd in their mindes till now;
And now haue toyled their vnbreathed memories
With this same play, against your nuptiall
The. And we will heare it
Hip. No my noble Lord, it is not for you. I haue heard
It ouer, and it is nothing, nothing in the world;
Vnless you can finde sport in their intents,
Extreamely stretched, and cond with cruell paine,
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
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 Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: "The character of the primitive ideas of that horde called by its
lawgiver the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps
also to induce it to maintain his laws and his system of government--
for the Books of Moses are a religious, political, and civil code--
that character bears the authority of terror; convulsions of nature
are interpreted with stupendous power as a vengeance from on high. In
fact, since this wandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyed by a
community settled in a patriarchal home, their sorrows as pilgrims
inspired them with none but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-stained.
In the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle of the rapid recoveries
of the natural world, and the prodigious effects of sunshine, which
Louis Lambert |
