| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: quarreled or complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their
quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness,
I perhaps came across traces of little understandings between them by
which one of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away.
There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils
practiced upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness.
It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge.
In going on with the record of what was hideous at Bly,
I not only challenge the most liberal faith--for which I
little care; but--and this is another matter--I renew what I
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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 An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.
The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the
canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge
floats by great forests and through great cities with their public
buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his
floating home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were
listening to another man's story or turning the leaves of a
picture-book in which he had no concern. He may take his afternoon
walk in some foreign country on the banks of the canal, and then
come home to dinner at his own fireside.
There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of
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