| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: women are seldom seen there; when they come it is to seek approbation
of their conduct,--a consecration of their self-importance. This
supremacy granted to one house is apt to wound the sensibilities of
other natives of the region, who console themselves by adding up the
cost it involves, and by which they profit. If it so happens that
there is no fortune large enough to keep open house in this way, the
big-wigs of the place choose a place of meeting, as they did at
Alencon, in the house of some inoffensive person, whose settled life
and character and position offers no umbrage to the vanities or the
interests of any one.
For some years the upper classes of Alencon had met in this way at the
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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 The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: them. The South therefore had been anxious to have the Missouri
Compromise repealed.
The people of the North, on the other hand, were not all wise or
disinterested in their way of attacking slavery. As always
happens, self-interest and moral purpose mingled on both sides;
but, as a whole, it may be said that they wished to get rid of
slavery because they felt it to be wrong, and totally out of
place in a country devoted to freedom and liberty. The quarrel
between them was as old as the nation, and it had been gaining
steadily in intensity. At first only a few persons in each
section had been really interested. By the year 1850 it had come
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