| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: tribulation and distress that came after it. The clay was put
into a trough and mixed and beaten and stirred and trampled.
It seemed almost unbearable. But there was consolation in the
thought that something very fine and noble was certainly
coming out of all this trouble. The clay felt sure that, if
it could only wait long enough, a wonderful reward was in
store for it.
Then it was put upon a swiftly turning wheel, and whirled
around until it seemed as if it must fly into a thousand
pieces. A strange power pressed it and moulded it, as it
revolved, and through all the dizziness and pain it felt that
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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 Persuasion by Jane Austen: for Henrietta's wedding-clothes to be talked of. She had imagined
such difficulties of fortune to exist there as must prevent
the marriage from being near at hand; but she learned from Charles that,
very recently, (since Mary's last letter to herself), Charles Hayter
had been applied to by a friend to hold a living for a youth
who could not possibly claim it under many years; and that
on the strength of his present income, with almost a certainty
of something more permanent long before the term in question,
the two families had consented to the young people's wishes,
and that their marriage was likely to take place in a few months,
quite as soon as Louisa's. "And a very good living it was,"
 Persuasion |