| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: steeped in its thick, gray damp; but overhead, the sun-touched
smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean,--shifting, rolling seas
of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood-
scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light. Wolfe's
artist-eye grew drunk with color. The gates of that other
world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world of
Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and
thine, of mill-owners and mill hands?
A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A
man,--he thought, stretching out his hands,--free to work, to
live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper
Life in the Iron-Mills |
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 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: breakfast-time, and instead of asking him to come in
she proposed that they should walk out to an old
orange-garden beyond the town. She had just been for
a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little
waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its
meshes. Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown
hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked
lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. As she
walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her
face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.
To Archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing
|
