| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: a thousand francs to my dressmaker; pay her for me!' She cannot.
I saw that myself. Delphine will be there too in a superb
toilette, and Anastasie ought not to be outshone by her younger
sister. And then--she was drowned in tears, poor girl! I felt so
humbled yesterday when I had not the twelve thousand francs, that
I would have given the rest of my miserable life to wipe out that
wrong. You see, I could have borne anything once, but latterly
this want of money has broken my heart. Oh! I did not do it by
halves; I titivated myself up a bit, and went out and sold my
spoons and forks and buckles for six hundred francs; then I went
to old Daddy Gobseck, and sold a year's interest on my annuity
Father Goriot |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has
been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For
that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical;
it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French,
depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme;
or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful
device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on
what principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be
pure convention; it may have no inherent beauty; all that we
have a right to ask of any prosody is, that it shall lay down
a pattern for the writer, and that what it lays down shall be
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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 Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: also a few scattered roses, dark yellow roses.
Muller walked thoughtfully through the churchyard. The sexton sat
huddled in an unhappy heap at the gate. He looked up in alarm as he
saw the detective walking towards him. Something in the stranger's
face told the little hunchback that he had made a discovery. The
sexton sprang up, his lips did not dare utter the question that his
eyes asked.
"I have found him," said the detective gravely.
The hunchback sexton staggered, then recovered himself, and hurried
away to fetch the magistrate and the doctor.
An hour later the murdered pastor lay in state in the chief apartment
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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 The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: feeling ill, and returned to her chimney-corner.
Such was the situation of affairs, and of people's minds in the house
of Madame de Dey, while along the road, between Paris and Cherbourg, a
young man in a brown jacket, called a "carmagnole," worn de rigueur at
that period, was making his way to Carentan. When drafts for the army
were first instituted, there was little or no discipline. The
requirements of the moment did not allow the Republic to equip its
soldiers immediately, and it was not an unusual thing to see the roads
covered with recruits, who were still wearing citizen's dress. These
young men either preceded or lagged behind their respective
battalions, according to their power of enduring the fatigues of a
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