| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: From the sphere where the least degree of intelligence gleamed, to the
most translucent souls who could see the road by which to ascend to
God, was there not an ascending scale of spiritual gift? And did not
spirits of the same sphere understand each other like brothers in
soul, in flesh, in mind, and in feeling?"
From this the Doctor went on to unfold the most wonderful theories of
sympathy. He set forth in Biblical language the phenomena of love, of
instinctive repulsion, of strong affinities which transcend the laws
of space, of the sudden mingling of souls which seem to recognize each
other. With regard to the different degrees of strength of which our
affections are capable, he accounted for them by the place, more or
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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 Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: destiny of the nation was in safe keeping.
Nothing would have amazed Mr. Lincoln more than to hear himself
called a man of letters; and yet it would be hard to find in all
literature anything to excel the brevity and beauty of his
address at Gettysburg or the lofty grandeur of this Second
Inaugural. In Europe his style has been called a model for the
study and imitation of princes, while in our own country many of
his phrases have already passed into the daily speech of mankind.
His gift of putting things simply and clearly was partly the
habit of his own clear mind, and partly the result of the
training he gave himself in days of boyish poverty, when paper
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