| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: a man of genius or a masterpiece. In all human sentiments there are,
as it were, primeval flowers bred of noble enthusiasms, which droop
and fade from year to year, till joy is but a memory and glory a lie.
Amid such fleeting emotions nothing so resembles love as the young
passion of an artist who tastes the first delicious anguish of his
destined fame and woe,--a passion daring yet timid, full of vague
confidence and sure discouragement. Is there a man, slender in
fortune, rich in his spring-time of genius, whose heart has not beaten
loudly as he approached a master of his art? If there be, that man
will forever lack some heart-string, some touch, I know not what, of
his brush, some fibre in his creations, some sentiment in his poetry.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: he had left on the quay. With the restive spirit, which is peculiar to
the nobility of the old school, in whom still survives the memory of
the League and the day of the Barricades (in 1588), he bewailed
himself in his cab, loudly enough to compromise him, over the change
that had come over the Court. "Formerly," he said to himself, "every
one could speak freely to the King of his own little affairs; the
nobles could ask him a favor, or for money, when it suited them, and
nowadays one cannot recover the money advanced for his service without
raising a scandal! By Heaven! the cross of Saint-Louis and the rank of
brigadier-general will not make good the three hundred thousand livres
I have spent, out and out, on the royal cause. I must speak to the
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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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: established themselves in a right-down acceptance of the articles
and disciplines to which they have subscribed and of the creeds they
profess and repeat. Some have recanted and abandoned their
positions in the priesthood. But a great number have neither
resisted the bacillus of criticism nor left the churches to which
they are attached. They have adopted compromises, they have
qualified their creeds with modifying footnotes of essential
repudiation; they have decided that plain statements are metaphors
and have undercut, transposed, and inverted the most vital points of
the vulgarly accepted beliefs. One may find within the Anglican
communion, Arians, Unitarians, Atheists, disbelievers in
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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 At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: and this I followed out over the sea toward the cliff's end.
Here the ledge inclined rapidly upward toward the top
of the cliffs--the stratum which formed it evidently having
been forced up at this steep angle when the mountains
behind it were born. As I climbed carefully up the ascent
my attention suddenly was attracted aloft by the sound
of strange hissing, and what resembled the flapping of wings.
And at the first glance there broke upon my horrified vision
the most frightful thing I had seen even within Pellucidar.
It was a giant dragon such as is pictured in the legends
and fairy tales of earth folk. Its huge body must have
At the Earth's Core |
