| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: And painful preparation: he must work
With unseen implements that have no names,
And he must win withal, to do that work,
Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill.
XXIII
To curse the chilled insistence of the dawn
Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud
The constant opportunity that lives
Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget
For this large prodigality of gold
That larger generosity of thought, --
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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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: like Charles of Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said,
but it seems it was monstrously to the point, and so rudely
conceived that the old duke never recovered the indignity.
He got home as far as Amboise, sickened, and died two days
after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of his age.
And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of
melodious rondels to the end of time.
V.
The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece
throughout. He never succeeded in any single purpose he set
before him; for his deliverance from England, after twenty-
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