| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: (LA GROSSE MARGOT) is typical of much; it is a piece of
experience that has nowhere else been rendered into
literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's
plainness mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the
business. I shall quote here a verse of an old students'
song, worth laying side by side with Villon's startling
ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he
did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is
thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:-
Nunc plango florem
AEtatis tenerae
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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: To sing themselves.
HAD I THE POWER THAT HAVE THE WILL
HAD I the power that have the will,
The enfeebled will - a modern curse -
This book of mine should blossom still
A perfect garden-ground of verse.
White placid marble gods should keep
Good watch in every shadowy lawn;
And from clean, easy-breathing sleep
The birds should waken me at dawn.
- A fairy garden; - none the less
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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 Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: every one else was gone, and say, 'Give me your shoe!' and Isaure
would put her little foot on a chair and take it off and give it to
him, with a glance, one of those glances that--in short, you
understand.
"At length Godefroid discovered a great mystery in Malvina. Whenever
du Tillet knocked at the door, the live red that colored Malvina's
face said 'Ferdinand!' When the poor girl's eyes fell on that two-
footed tiger, they lighted up like a brazier fanned by a current of
air. When Ferdinand drew her away to the window or a side table, she
betrayed her secret infinite joy. It is a rare and wonderful thing to
see a woman so much in love that she loses her cunning to be strange,
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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 Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: "Follow him, Hubert Ratcliffe," said the Dwarf, "and inform him
of his destiny. He will rejoice--for to breathe air and to
handle gold is to him happiness,"
"I understand nothing of all this," said Sir Frederick Langley;
"but we are here a body of gentlemen in arms and authority for
King James; and whether you really, sir, be that Sir Edward
Mauley, who has been so long supposed dead in confinement, or
whether you be an impostor assuming his name and title, we will
use the freedom of detaining you, till your appearance here, at
this moment, is better accounted for; we will have no spies among
us--Seize on him, my friends."
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