| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: you, sir, I bathed the child's corpse in my tears, crying out to the
Power I do not know, and which is above us all! I, who do not believe
in God!--(For if I were not a materialist, I should not be myself.)
"I have told everything when I say that. You don't know--no man knows
what suffering is. I alone know it. The fire of anguish so dried up my
tears, that all last night I could not weep. Now I can, because I feel
that you can understand me. I saw you, sitting there just now, an
Image of Justice. Oh! monsieur, may God--for I am beginning to believe
in Him--preserve you from ever being as bereft as I am! That cursed
judge has robbed me of my soul, Monsieur le Comte! At this moment they
are burying my life, my beauty, my virtue, my conscience, all my
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: walked down the passage in silence, and she stood aside with a
grave gesture, making Wyant pass before her into the room. Then
she crossed over and drew the curtain back from the picture.
The light of the early afternoon poured full on it: its surface
appeared to ripple and heave with a fluid splendor. The colors
had lost none of their warmth, the outlines none of their pure
precision; it seemed to Wyant like some magical flower which had
burst suddenly from the mould of darkness and oblivion.
He turned to Miss Lombard with a movement of comprehension.
"Ah, I understand--you couldn't part with it, after all!" he cried.
"No--I couldn't part with it," she answered.
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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 Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: breath to number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of the
open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon the
slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at
some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be
walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
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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 Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: ends of the earth involved: and thus though the notion of
the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general
acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability,
it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and
this decided me to consider further of its possibilities.
The man who should thus be buried was the first question: a
good man, whose return to life would be hailed by the reader
and the other characters with gladness? This trenched upon
the Christian picture, and was dismissed. If the idea, then,
was to be of any use at all for me, I had to create a kind of
evil genius to his friends and family, take him through many
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