| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: both parents.
My sister pined for her Spanish home all these years of exile; she
was always talking of Spain to the child, and tending and
nourishing the love of Spain in the little thing's heart as a
precious flower; and she died happy in the knowledge that the
fruitage of her patriotic labors was as rich as even she could
desire.
Cathy is a sufficiently good little scholar, for her nine years;
her mother taught her Spanish herself, and kept it always fresh
upon her ear and her tongue by hardly ever speaking with her in any
other tongue; her father was her English teacher, and talked with
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the
scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself.
The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of
our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque,[334] representing,
as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to
the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science
recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who
does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate
his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on
the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and
unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves
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