| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of
her, the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him
more grimly resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of
thinking her over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while
she had been preoccupied with her housing and establishment in
London; it was with a sense of extraordinary injustice, of having
had a march stolen upon her, of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda
found herself faced by foregone conclusions. He was ready now even
with the details of his project. She should go on with her life in
London exactly as she had planned it. He would take fifteen hundred
a year for himself and all the rest she might spend without check or
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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 Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes.
But all this belonged--I mean their magnificent little surrender--
just to the special array of the facts that were most abysmal.
Turned out for Sunday by his uncle's tailor, who had had a free
hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air,
Miles's whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation,
were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom
I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances
wondering how I should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred.
I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke,
the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe
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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 Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: table, round which the ladies all placed themselves at their
embroidery, though I preferred looking over curious illuminated
missals, etc., etc.
The next day was the meeting of the County Agricultural Society. . .
. At the hour appointed we all repaired to the ground where the
prizes were to be given out. . . . Lord Braybrooke made first a most
paternal and interesting address, which showed me in the most
favorable view the relation between the noble and the lower class in
England, a relation which must depend much on the personal character
of the lord of the manor. . . . First came prizes to ploughmen, then
the plough boys, then the shepherds, then to such peasants as had
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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 Phaedo by Plato: and wisdom herself are the purgation of them. The founders of the
mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking
nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes
unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but
that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with
the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the mysteries, 'are the thyrsus-
bearers, but few are the mystics,'--meaning, as I interpret the words, 'the
true philosophers.' In the number of whom, during my whole life, I have
been seeking, according to my ability, to find a place;--whether I have
sought in a right way or not, and whether I have succeeded or not, I shall
truly know in a little while, if God will, when I myself arrive in the
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