| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: growing fainter behind him.
"My journey!" he repeated to himself,--" my journey! why shouldn't
I start on it now? Start off, and never come back?"
It was a very little thing, after all, which annoyed him, but the
mention of it always touched a sore nerve of his nature. A dozen
years before, when a boy at school, he had made a temporary
friendship with another boy of his age, and had one day said
to the latter, in the warmth of his first generous confidence:
"When I am a little older, I shall make a great journey, and come
back rich, and buy Whitney's place!"
Now, Whitney's place, with its stately old brick mansion, its
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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 Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: And through the body's every winding way
And orifice? And so by many means
Thou'rt free to learn that nature of the soul
Hath passed in fragments out along the frame,
And that 'twas shivered in the very body
Ere ever it slipped abroad and swam away
Into the winds of air. For never a man
Dying appears to feel the soul go forth
As one sure whole from all his body at once,
Nor first come up the throat and into mouth;
But feels it failing in a certain spot,
Of The Nature of Things |
