| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the
form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo
coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of
water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus
to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself:
the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there
is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow
seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of
the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other,
but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a
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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 American by Henry James: M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity.
He laid his hand on Newman's sleeve and seemed on the point
of saying something, but he suddenly checked himself,
leaned back in his chair, and puffed at his cigar.
At last, however, breaking silence,--"Certainly," he said,
"my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless I
was in a measure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come,
and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you,
and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms.
It was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not
sorry to do something that would show I was not performing
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