| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: gratification. Consequently, he was much liked in the world of actors
and actresses, journalists and artists. For one thing, they had the
same vices and the same indolence as himself. Men who could all say
such witty things in their cups or in company with a danseuse, how
could they help being friends? If des Lupeaulx had not been a general-
secretary he would certainly have been a journalist. Thus, in that
fifteen years' struggle in which the harlequin sabre of epigram opened
a breach by which insurrection entered the citadel, des Lupeaulx never
received so much as a scratch.
As the young fry of clerks looked at this man playing bowls in the
gardens of the ministry with the minister's children, they cracked
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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 Aspern Papers by Henry James: for all the world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk.
The most I said was that he was no doubt not a woman's poet:
to which she rejoined aptly enough that he had been at least
Miss Bordereau's. The strange thing had been for me to discover
in England that she was still alive: it was as if I had been told
Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the famous Lady Hamilton,
for it seemed to me that she belonged to a generation as extinct.
"Why, she must be tremendously old--at least a hundred," I had said;
but on coming to consider dates I saw that it was not strictly
necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the common span.
Nonetheless she was very far advanced in life, and her relations with
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