| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: she's a very sweet, nice, exceptional girl."
The next morning he breakfasted alone, as usual. It was snowing
with a fine-flaked desultoriness just sufficient to make the
woodland gray, without ever achieving whiteness. There was not a
single letter for Fitzpiers, only a medical circular and a weekly
newspaper.
To sit before a large fire on such mornings, and read, and
gradually acquire energy till the evening came, and then, with
lamp alight, and feeling full of vigor, to pursue some engrossing
subject or other till the small hours, had hitherto been his
practice. But to-day he could not settle into his chair. That
The Woodlanders |
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 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: are making their spheres; but she is already so far enabled to judge of
distance, that she always describes her spheres so as to intersect largely;
and then she unites the points of intersection by perfectly flat surfaces.
We have further to suppose, but this is no difficulty, that after hexagonal
prisms have been formed by the intersection of adjoining spheres in the
same layer, she can prolong the hexagon to any length requisite to hold the
stock of honey; in the same way as the rude humble-bee adds cylinders of
wax to the circular mouths of her old cocoons. By such modifications of
instincts in themselves not very wonderful,--hardly more wonderful than
those which guide a bird to make its nest,--I believe that the hive-bee has
acquired, through natural selection, her inimitable architectural powers.
On the Origin of Species |
