| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: "It's only Mr. Turner, on the floor below," said Mary, and she felt
grateful to Mr. Turner for having alarmed Ralph, and for having given
a false alarm.
"Will there be a crowd?" Ralph asked, after a pause.
"There'll be the Morrises and the Crashaws, and Dick Osborne, and
Septimus, and all that set. Katharine Hilbery is coming, by the way,
so William Rodney told me."
"Katharine Hilbery!" Ralph exclaimed.
"You know her?" Mary asked, with some surprise.
"I went to a tea-party at her house."
Mary pressed him to tell her all about it, and Ralph was not at all
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: Leafless apple-trees lined the edges of the road. The ditches were
covered with ice. The dogs on the neighbouring farms barked; and
Felicite, with her hands beneath her cape, her little black sabots and
her basket, trotted along nimbly in the middle of the sidewalk. She
crossed the forest, passed by the Haut-Chene, and reached Saint-
Gatien.
Behind her, in a cloud of dust and impelled by the steep incline, a
mail-coach drawn by galloping horses advanced like a whirlwind. When
he saw a woman in the middle of the road, who did not get out of the
way, the driver stood up in his seat and shouted to her and so did the
postilion, while the four horses, which he could not hold back,
A Simple Soul |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from From London to Land's End by Daniel Defoe: buried in the same grave, and which intimate that one died of a
fever, and the other of a dropsy:
"Surrepuit natum Febris, matrem abstulit Hydrops,
Igne Prior Fatis, Altera cepit Aqua."
As the city itself stands in a vale on the bank, and at the
conjunction of two small rivers, so the country rising every way,
but just as the course of the water keeps the valley open, you must
necessarily, as you go out of the gates, go uphill every wry; but
when once ascended, you come to the most charming plains and most
pleasant country of that kind in England; which continues with very
small intersections of rivers and valleys for above fifty miles, as
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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 Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: class have no more faithful impressions, because their soul, like a
mirror, worn from use, no longer reflects any image; the others
economize their senses and life, even while they seem, like the first,
to be flinging them away broadcast. The first, on the faith of a hope,
devote themselves without conviction to a system which has wind and
tide against it, but they leap upon another political craft when the
first goes adrift; the second take the measure of the future, sound
it, and see in political fidelity what the English see in commercial
integrity, an element of success. Where the young man of possessions
makes a pun or an epigram upon the restoration of the throne, he who
has nothing makes a public calculation or a secret reservation, and
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
