| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these
and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his
seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously
abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends
at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me
tell of the rooms in which it was held. These were seven--an
imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long
and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to
the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is
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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 Walking by Henry David Thoreau: but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and
wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and
mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the
wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the
wild--the mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way
above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as
unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower
discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the
East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like
the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of
knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of
 Walking |