| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: quadrille at the close of a ball. A few slender and graceful columns,
their heads adorned with wreaths of trefoil, began to laugh and dance
here and there. Some of the pointed arches dashed at the tall lancet
windows, who, like ladies of the Middle Ages, wore the armorial
bearings of their houses emblazoned on their golden robes. The dance
of the mitred arcades with the slender windows became like a fray at a
tourney.
In another moment every stone in the church vibrated, without leaving
its place; for the organ-pipes spoke, and I heard divine music
mingling with the songs of angels, and unearthly harmony, accompanied
by the deep notes of the bells, that boomed as the giant towers rocked
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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 To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: night, of which the most part had been spent at
anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as
his wife had inherited a house and enough to live on
(from a bachelor uncle who had made some money
in the coal business) he threw up his command of
an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he
had escaped from the galleys. After all these years
he might have counted on the fingers of his two
hands all the days he had been out of sight of Eng-
land. He had never known what it was to be out
of soundings. "I have never been further than
 To-morrow |