| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli--"
"I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it."
"Have you never thought--"
"Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had."
"But surely you must have felt--"
"Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--"
"How beautiful! How strange--"
Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains
answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length,
with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said:
"Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us.
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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 St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: to be rather a successful merchant; and found means to procure many
little delicacies and alleviations, such as children or prisoners
desire.
I am scarcely drawing the portrait of a very melancholy man. It is
not indeed my character; and I had, in a comparison with my
comrades, many reasons for content. In the first place, I had no
family: I was an orphan and a bachelor; neither wife nor child
awaited me in France. In the second, I had never wholly forgot the
emotions with which I first found myself a prisoner; and although a
military prison be not altogether a garden of delights, it is still
preferable to a gallows. In the third, I am almost ashamed to say
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