| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: of having got rusty. He surveyed through the park railings the
evidences of the town's opulence and luxury with an approving eye.
All these people had to be protected. Protection is the first
necessity of opulence and luxury. They had to be protected; and
their horses, carriages, houses, servants had to be protected; and
the source of their wealth had to be protected in the heart of the
city and the heart of the country; the whole social order
favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be protected against
the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour. It had to - and Mr
Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not
been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion. His
The Secret Agent |
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 Juana by Honore de Balzac: morals of every country which served as the scene of its wars, a
street prostitute came to Tarragona, driven from Venice at the time of
its fall. The life of this woman had been a tissue of romantic
adventures and strange vicissitudes. To her, oftener than to any other
woman of her class, it had happened, thanks to the caprice of great
lords struck with her extraordinary beauty, to be literally gorged
with gold and jewels and all the delights of excessive wealth,--
flowers, carriages, pages, maids, palaces, pictures, journeys (like
those of Catherine II.); in short, the life of a queen, despotic in
her caprices and obeyed, often beyond her own imaginings. Then,
without herself, or any one, chemist, physician, or man of science,
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