| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Poor and Proud by Oliver Optic: "I am glad you have."
"I went down town after I saw you, and hearing of a place in
Tremont Row, I went to apply for it."
"Did you get it?"
"Not yet, but I hope to get it. They agreed to give me three
dollars a week if everything proved satisfactory; but they wanted
a recommendation from my last employers."
"Of course they will give you one."
"No, they would not; they were offended because I left them."
"Then you asked them?"
"Yes, I went after one this afternoon, and they would not give it
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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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: psychology. And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to
accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello,
or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it seems
as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English painters
spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of
the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving
to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is
invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are,
as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded
the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not
worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and
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