| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be
stated plainly and compactly as follows. A little while ago we
current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us
distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and
so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an
ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our
individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other
individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants. But the
species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to
newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual life
is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: she understood that now at last she was really going
there.
XVI
THE rain held off, and an hour later, when she started,
wild gleams of sunlight were blowing across the fields.
After Harney's departure she had returned her bicycle
to its owner at Creston, and she was not sure of being
able to walk all the way to the Mountain. The deserted
house was on the road; but the idea of spending the
night there was unendurable, and she meant to try to
push on to Hamblin, where she could sleep under a wood-
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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: of a long table, and I was just opposite the Prince, between Lord
Exeter and Lord Dalhousie, who is the son of the former Governor of
Nova Scotia, was in the last ministry, and a most agreeable person.
I talked to my neighbors as at any other dinner, but the Queen spoke
to no one but Prince Albert, with a word or two to the Duke of
Norfolk, who was on her right, and is the first peer of the realm.
The dinner was rather quickly despatched, and when the Queen rose we
followed her back into the corridor. She walked to the fire and
stood some minutes, and then advanced to me and enquired about Mr.
Bancroft, his visit to Paris, if he had been there before, etc. I
expressed, of course, the regret he would feel at losing the honor
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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 Glasses by Henry James: so gratefully to rest upon. She came back to me with tale upon
tale, and it all might be or mightn't. I never met my pretty model
in the world--she moved, it appeared, in exalted circles--and could
only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the grandeur of her
life and the freedom of her hand.
I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling,
and she had listened to my story so far as she had the art of such
patience, asking me indeed more questions about him than I could
answer; then she had capped my anecdote with others much more
striking, the disclosure of effects produced in the most
extraordinary quarters: on people who had followed her into
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