| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: vein, and he sank into a profound sleep.
III
There is a slumber so deep that it annihilates time. It is
like a fragment of eternity. Beneath its enchantment of
vacancy, a day seems like a thousand years, and a thousand
years might well pass as one day.
It was such a sleep that fell upon Hermas in the Grove of
Daphne. An immeasurable period, an interval of life so blank
and empty that he could not tell whether it was long or short,
had passed over him when his senses began to stir again. The
setting sun was shooting arrows of gold under the glossy
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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 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black and
the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F. Babbitt was Estates,
Insurance, Rents. The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds, and
read it as though it were a hundred words long. He did not bend from his
episcopal dignity, hut he growled, "I'll see if he's around."
From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet sharp-eyed
man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and burning brown
trousers--Mr. Healey Hanson. Mr. Hanson said only "Yuh?" but his implacable
and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt's soul, and he seemed not at all
impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he had admitted to every
acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had paid a hundred and twenty-five
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