| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: was a keen sense of curiosity that goaded him into boldness. The
devil himself might have whispered the words that were echoing
through his brain, Moisten one of the eyes with the liquid! He
took up a linen cloth, moistened it sparingly with the precious
fluid, and passed it lightly over the right eyelid of the corpse.
The eye unclosed. . . .
"Aha!" said Don Juan. He gripped the flask tightly, as we clutch
in dreams the branch from which we hang suspended over a
precipice.
For the eye was full of life. It was a young child's eye set in a
death's head; the light quivered in the depths of its youthful
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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 Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: the line of poor Armour's rejected canvases, but the need to get
away from Kauffer with his equal claim upon my sympathy was too
great. To have cracked my solemn mask by a single smile would have
been to break down irrepressibly, and never since I set foot in
India had I felt a parallel desire to laugh and to weep. There was
a pang in it which I recognize as impossible to convey, arising from
the point of contact, almost unimaginable yet so clear before me, of
the uncompromising ideals of the atelier and the naive demands of
the Oriental, with an unhappy photographer caught between and
wriggling. The situation was really monstrous, the fatuous
rejection of all that fine scheming and exquisite manipulation, and
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