| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: escort than an easy conscience. I think I see him getting his
cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a lantern in one
hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk January
night. It might have been that very day that Skirving had
defied him in these words: "It is altogether unavailing for
your lordship to menace me; for I have long learned to fear
not the face of man;" and I can fancy, as Braxfield reflected
on the number of what he called GRUMBLETONIANS in Edinburgh,
and of how many of them must bear special malice against so
upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that very
moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile
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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 Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and variety of the
road itself, along which he takes his way. Not only near at hand, in
the lithe contortions with which it adapts itself to the interchanges
of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a few hundred
feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the afternoon sun,
he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening that he can
always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the river-
side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has always
with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will find in that
sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level
there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention
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