| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: represented the most various phases of human life, shadowed by
misfortune; sometimes the peace of the graveyard without the dead, who
speak in the language of epitaphs; one day I saw in it the home of
lepers; another, the house of the Atridae; but, above all, I found
there provincial life, with its contemplative ideas, its hour-glass
existence. I often wept there, I never laughed.
"More than once I felt involuntary terrors as I heard overhead the
dull hum of the wings of some hurrying wood-pigeon. The earth is dank;
you must be on the watch for lizards, vipers, and frogs, wandering
about with the wild freedom of nature; above all, you must have no
fear of cold, for in a few moments you feel an icy cloak settle on
La Grande Breteche |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: River for Boston; but at the first station he had
jumped on the train with a hand-bag and scrambled up
into the hills. For two golden rainless August weeks
he had camped in the house, getting eggs and milk from
the solitary farm in the valley, where no one knew him,
and doing his cooking over a spirit-lamp. He got up
every day with the sun, took a plunge in a brown pool
he knew of, and spent long hours lying in the
scented hemlock-woods above the house, or wandering
along the yoke of the Eagle Ridge, far above the misty
blue valleys that swept away east and west between the
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