| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: earth; while all the solemn and earnest meditation of the Neoplatonists,
however good or true, worked no deliverance whatsoever. Plotinus longed
at one time to make a practical attempt. He asked the Emperor
Gallienus, his patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania; to allow
him to call it Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of him and his
disciples, that they might there realise Plato's ideal republic.
Luckily for the reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme was swamped by
the courtiers of Gallienus, and the earth was saved the sad and
ludicrous sight of a realised Laputa; probably a very quarrelsome one.
That was his highest practical conception: the foundation of a new
society: not the regeneration of society as it existed.
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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 Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: Within an hour after Mr. Lincoln's body was taken to the White
House the town was shrouded in black. Not only the public
buildings, the shops, and the better class of dwellings were
draped in funeral decorations; still more touching proof of
affection was shown in the poorest class of homes, where laboring
men of both colors found means in their poverty to afford some
scanty bit of mourning. The interest and veneration of the people
still centered at the White House, where, under a tall catafalque
in the East Room the late chief lay in the majesty of death,
rather than in the modest tavern on Pennsylvania Avenue, where
the new President had his lodgings, and where the Chief Justice
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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 Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem
as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony
clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a
moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the
clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes
of the chime die away--they have endured but an instant--and a
light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And
now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and
fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows
through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber
which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the
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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 Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: the next crimson with blushes, stood Mademoiselle de Cocheforet.
I cried out her name.
'M. de Berault,' she said, trembling. 'You did not expect to see
me?'
'I expected to see no one so little, Mademoiselle,' I answered,
striving to recover my composure.
'Yet you might have thought that we should not utterly desert
you,' she replied, with a reproachful humility which went to my
heart. 'We should have been base indeed, if we had not made some
attempt to save you. I thank Heaven, M. de Berault, that it has
so far succeeded that that strange man has promised me your life.
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