| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: of the learned people and noblemen have formed an Archaeological
Society for the study and preservation [of] the interesting
architectural antiquities of the kingdom, and [it] is upon the
occasion of the annual meeting of this society for a week at Norwich
that the Bishop has invited us to stay a few days at the palace and
join them in their agreeable antiquarian excursions. We arrived on
Friday at five o'clock after a long dull journey of five hours on
the railway. . . . Staying in the house are our friends, Mr. and
Mrs. Milman, Lord Northampton and his son, Lord Alwyne Compton, and
the Bishop's family, consisting of Mrs. Stanley, and of two Miss
Stanleys, agreeable and highly cultivated girls, and Mr. Arthur
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: watched herself, in the memory of that night, walk away from him as
if she were making an end, she found something too pitiful in the
primness of such a gait. Hadn't she precisely established on the
part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?
It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an
irritation, after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that
presently became one with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton,
who, on her friend's withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to
the sounder and left her the other work. She knew indeed she
should have a chance to see them, when she would, on file; and she
was divided, as the day went on, between the two impressions of all
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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 Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or
despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent
fact which degrades him, or of a secret condition, or even of a coming
revenge, those two men divine each other's souls, and are able to
measure the gulf which separates or ought to separate them. They
observe each other unconsciously; their minds are preoccupied by
themselves; through their looks, their gestures, an indefinable
emanation of their thought transpires; there's a magnet between them.
I don't know which has the strongest power of attraction, vengeance or
crime, hatred or insult. Like a priest who cannot consecrate the host
in presence of an evil spirit, each is ill at ease and distrustful;
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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 Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: things. He might, perhaps, know woman; but he knew nothing of the
divinity. Why not take his rightful place in the world, and taste the
delights of Parisian society?
"Why doesn't a man who bears party per bend gules and or, a bezant and
crab counterchanged," cried Rastignac, "display that ancient
escutcheon of Picardy on the panels of a carriage? You have thirty
thousand francs a year, and the proceeds of your pen; you have
justified your motto: Ars thesaurusque virtus, that punning device our
ancestors were always seeking, and yet you never appear in the Bois de
Boulogne! We live in times when virtue ought to show itself."
"If you read your works to that species of stout Laforet, whom you
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