| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: not altogether disapprovingly, a manual cheek given to her saucy
tongue. The little wretch had done her utmost to hurt her cousin's
sensitive though uncultivated feelings, and a physical argument was
the only mode he had of balancing the account, and repaying its
effects on the inflictor. He afterwards gathered the books and
hurled them on the fire. I read in his countenance what anguish it
was to offer that sacrifice to spleen. I fancied that as they
consumed, he recalled the pleasure they had already imparted, and
the triumph and ever-increasing pleasure he had anticipated from
them; and I fancied I guessed the incitement to his secret studies
also. He had been content with daily labour and rough animal
 Wuthering Heights |
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 Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly
jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things
in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture,
corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps dim
anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,
no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but
still ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a
brief and stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo
anywhere in Miss Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if
they were empty, were the equivalents of astoundingly decorated
predecessors. Perhaps it was just as well there was no inherited
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