| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: southwards into the blue, pointing to his native home across the skyey
regions. The ascetic pallor of his face had given place to a glow of
triumph, his eyes flashed, he was as grand as a lion shaking his mane.
"But you, poor child," he went on, looking at Godefroid, whose cheeks
were beaded with glittering tears, "have you, like me, studied life
from blood-stained pages? What can you have to weep for, at your age?"
"Alas!" said Godefroid, "I regret a land more beautiful than any land
on earth--a land I never saw and yet remember. Oh, if I could but
cleave the air on beating wings, I would fly----"
"Whither?" asked the exile.
"Up there," replied the boy.
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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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: man of least pretensions. Perhaps some cowardice withheld me
from the proper warmth of tone; perhaps it is easier to be
just to those nearer us in rank of mind. Such at least is
the fact, which other critics may explain. For these were
all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I
did not love the men, my love was the greater to their books.
I had read them and lived with them; for months they were
continually in my thoughts; I seemed to rejoice in their joys
and to sorrow with them in their griefs; and behold, when I
came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly courteous
and seldom wholly just.
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