| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: Lizzie shook her head. "No, she does n't!" she said.
"Do you think everything she says," asked Clifford, "is to be taken
the opposite way?"
"I think that is!" said Lizzie.
Clifford was going to remark that in this case the Baroness must
desire greatly to bring about a marriage between Mr. Clifford
Wentworth and Miss Elizabeth Acton; but he resolved, on the whole,
to suppress this observation.
CHAPTER IX
It seemed to Robert Acton, after Eugenia had come to his house,
that something had passed between them which made them
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: Balafres, father and son, wounded and scarred in the same manner, lost
something of this type, but not the grace and affability by which, as
much as by their bravery, they won the hearts of the soldiery.
It is not useless to relate how the present Grand Master received his
wound; for it was healed by the heroic measures of a personage of our
drama,--by Ambroise Pare, the man we have already mentioned as under
obligations to Lecamus, syndic of the guild of furriers. At the siege
of Calais the duke had his face pierced through and through by a
lance, the point of which, after entering the cheek just below the
right eye, went through to the neck, below the left eye, and remained,
broken off, in the face. The duke lay dying in his tent in the midst
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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 An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: must have been fifty people about the bridge. We were as pleasant
as we could be with all but Carnival. We said good-bye, shaking
hands with the old gentleman who knew the river and the young
gentleman who had a smattering of English; but never a word for
Carnival. Poor Carnival! here was a humiliation. He who had been
so much identified with the canoes, who had given orders in our
name, who had shown off the boats and even the boatmen like a
private exhibition of his own, to be now so publicly shamed by the
lions of his caravan! I never saw anybody look more crestfallen
than he. He hung in the background, coming timidly forward ever
and again as he thought he saw some symptom of a relenting humour,
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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 Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: earlier volumes has described as slowly putting forth its leaves
and rootless, while painfully struggling for existence in a
hostile soil, has at last grown into a mighty tree of liberty,
drawing sustenance from all lands, and protecting all civilized
peoples with its pleasant shade. We congratulate Mr. Motley upon
the successful completion of the second portion of his great
work; and we think that the Netherlanders of our time have reason
to be grateful to the writer who has so faithfully and eloquently
told the story of their country's fearful struggle against civil
and ecclesiastical tyranny, and its manifold contributions to the
advancement of European civilization.
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
