| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bridau, Joseph
The Purse
A Bachelor's Establishment
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Start in Life
Modeste Mignon
Another Study of Woman
Letters of Two Brides
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
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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 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Though they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say,
causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their
addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message
or more vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself.
What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE--things terrible
and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse
in the past. Such things naturally left on the surface,
for the time, a chill which we vociferously denied that we felt;
and we had, all three, with repetition, got into such splendid
training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark
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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 Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: sight of the case.
"My dear Jane Carew, here you are with Mar-
garet carrying that jewel-case out in plain sight.
How dare you do such a thing? I really wonder
you have not been held up a dozen times."
Miss Carew smiled her gentle but almost stern
smile -- the Carew smile, which consisted in a widen-
ing and slightly upward curving of tightly closed lips.
"I do not think," said she, "that anybody would
be apt to interfere with Margaret."
Viola Longstreet laughed, the ringing peal of a
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