| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: he had smitten. But the third, that fled down the river (and
he was ever the fiercest and the most outrageous), his name
was Flumen, for he dwelt in the caves of the stream, and was
the master of it before the Mill was built.
"And now," wept the Maid, "he must have had his will with
me and with the Mill, but for God's mercy, thanked be our Lord
Jesus!"
"Thank me too," said Mlartimor.
"So I do," said Lirette, and she kissed him. "Yet am I
heavy at heart and fearful, for my father is sorely mishandled
and his arm is broken, so that he cannot tend the Mill nor
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: times when there was no one present; I fancied that I might succeed in this
manner. Not a bit; I made no way with him. Lastly, as I had failed
hitherto, I thought that I must take stronger measures and attack him
boldly, and, as I had begun, not give him up, but see how matters stood
between him and me. So I invited him to sup with me, just as if he were a
fair youth, and I a designing lover. He was not easily persuaded to come;
he did, however, after a while accept the invitation, and when he came the
first time, he wanted to go away at once as soon as supper was over, and I
had not the face to detain him. The second time, still in pursuance of my
design, after we had supped, I went on conversing far into the night, and
when he wanted to go away, I pretended that the hour was late and that he
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: his mouth to remark, "Three francs for a weeks board? You might as
well pay nothing at all."
"Perhaps I shall end as a miller's man," thought the poet, as his eyes
wandered over the lovely country. Then the miller's wife made a bed
ready for him, and Lucien lay down and slept so long that his hostess
was frightened.
"Courtois," she said, next day at noon, "just go in and see whether
that young man is dead or alive; he has been lying there these
fourteen hours."
The miller was busy spreading out his fishing-nets and lines. "It is
my belief," he said, "that the pretty fellow yonder is some starveling
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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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: youth, in the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and
the elegances of life, discovers in one brief week how minute his
true relation to the human aggregate,---how insignificant his
part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the
age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend,
through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of
Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood
loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the
volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences
eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with
never a pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more,
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