| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters: Defined, and fixed, and fading never,
Stamped deep on vision, heart, and brain.
"And we might meet--time may have changed him;
Chance may reveal the mystery,
The secret influence which estranged him;
Love may restore him yet to me.
"False thought--false hope--in scorn be banished!
I am not loved--nor loved have been;
Recall not, then, the dreams scarce vanished;
Traitors! mislead me not again!
"To words like yours I bid defiance,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: With seaward eyes set keen against the gale,
On some lone foreland, watching sail by sail,
The portbound ships for one ship that was late;
And sail by sail, his heart burned up with joy,
And cruelly was quenched, until at last
One ship, the looked-for pennant at its mast,
Bore gaily, and dropt safely past the buoy;
And lo! the loved one was not there - was dead.
Then would he watch no more; no more the sea
With myriad vessels, sail by sail, perplex
His eyes and mock his longing. Weary head,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: glance, as it were with an azure mantle, "Heaven shall by thine
heritage!"
Silence fell among them after these words, which sounded in the souls
of the man and of the woman like the first notes of some celestial
harmony.
"If you would teach your feet to tread the Path to heaven, know that
the way is hard at first," said the weary sufferer; "God wills that
you shall seek Him for Himself. In that sense, He is jealous; He
demands your whole self. But when you have given Him yourself, never,
never will He abandon you. I leave with you the keys of the kingdom of
His Light, where evermore you shall dwell in the bosom of the Father,
Seraphita |
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 Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: judging of it. No one could be calm in his presence. I alone, perhaps,
was not afraid of him; he had indeed taken such a singular fancy to me
that he thought everything I did right. When he was in a rage his brow
was knit and the muscles of the middle of his forehead set in a delta,
or, to be more explicit, in Redgauntlet's horseshoe. This mark was,
perhaps, even more terrifying than the magnetic flashes of his blue
eyes. His whole frame quivered, and his strength, great as it was in
his normal state, became almost unbounded.
"He spoke with a strong guttural roll. His voice, at least as powerful
as that of Charles Nordier's Oudet, threw an incredible fulness of
tone into the syllable or the consonant in which this burr was
|
