| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: house. A few trees round it, and a little garden, a pond with a
Chinese duck, a study for your father, a study for me, and a sitting
room for Katharine, because then she'll be a married lady."
At this Katharine shivered a little, drew up to the fire, and warmed
her hands by spreading them over the topmost peak of the coal. She
wished to bring the talk back to marriage again, in order to hear Aunt
Charlotte's views, but she did not know how to do this.
"Let me look at your engagement-ring, Aunt Charlotte," she said,
noticing her own.
She took the cluster of green stones and turned it round and round,
but she did not know what to say next.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: precious apparel. There are objets de luxe innumerable. There
are children's playthings: French dolls in marvellous toilets,
and toy carts, and wooden horses, and wooden spades, and brave
little wooden ships that rode out the gale in which the great
Nautilus went down. There is money in notes and in coin--in
purses, in pocketbooks, and in pockets: plenty of it! There are
silks, satins, laces, and fine linen to be stripped from the
bodies of the drowned,--and necklaces, bracelets, watches,
finger-rings and fine chains, brooches and trinkets ... "Chi
bidizza!--Oh! chi bedda mughieri! Eccu, la bidizza!" That
ball-dress was made in Paris by--But you never heard of him,
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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 The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: at once, and put him in your interests."
After talking with the mayor, the shrewd old man made visits on
various pretexts to the principal families of Carentan, to all of whom
he mentioned that Madame de Dey, in spite of her illness, would
receive her friends that evening. Matching his own craft against those
wily Norman minds, he replied to the questions put to him on the
nature of Madame de Dey's illness in a manner that hoodwinked the
community. He related to a gouty old dame, that Madame de Dey had
almost died of a sudden attack of gout in the stomach, but had been
relieved by a remedy which the famous doctor, Tronchin, had once
recommended to her,--namely, to apply the skin of a freshly-flayed
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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 Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in
English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length,
and with entire delight, read ROBINSON. It is like the story of a
love-chase. If he had heard a letter from CLARISSA, would he have
been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet
CLARISSA has every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone
excepted - pictorial or picture-making romance. While ROBINSON
depends, for the most part and with the overwhelming majority of
its readers, on the charm of circumstance.
In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and
the pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall
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