| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: listened to the edict fulminated against his lodgers by the sergeant
of the watch. She mechanically looked up at the window of the room
inhabited by the old man, and shivered with horror as she suddenly
caught sight of the gloomy, melancholy face, and the piercing eye that
so affected her husband, accustomed as he was to dealing with
criminals.
At that period, great and small, priests and laymen, all trembled
before the idea of any supernatural power. The word "magic" was as
powerful as leprosy to root up feelings, break social ties, and freeze
piety in the most generous soul. It suddenly struck the constable's
wife that she had never, in fact, seen either of her lodgers
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: and the wholesome morning breeze, and the warmth of a dawning life,
and the mad music of the lark! Look Eastward!
"Fading, with the Night, the clouds of ignorance, and the deadly blight
of sin, and the silent tears of sorrow: and ever rising, higher,
higher, with the Day, the radiant dawn of knowledge, and the sweet
breath of purity, and the throb of a world's ecstasy! Look Eastward!
[Image...'Look eastward!']
"Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered
leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets
thatnumb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling
upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will,
Sylvie and Bruno |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Heap O' Livin' by Edgar A. Guest: war was through.
But it's tramp, tramp, tramp,
And it's never look behind,
And when you see a stranger's kids
Pretend that you are blind.
The spring is coming back again, the birds
begin to mate;
The skies are full of kindness, but the world is
full of hate.
And it's I that should be bending now in peace
above the soil
A Heap O' Livin' |
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 Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: any come accidentally, to neither love nor nurse them, that it
may not suffer. But our wives reason, and reason in this way,
and that is why I said that, when a man does not live as a man,
he is beneath the animal."
"But then, how is it necessary to act, in your opinion, in order
to treat children humanly?" I asked.
"How? Why, love them humanly."
"Well, do not mothers love their children?"
"They do not love them humanly, or very seldom do, and that is
why they do not love them even as dogs. Mark this, a hen, a
goose, a wolf, will always remain to woman inaccessible ideals of
The Kreutzer Sonata |
