| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: Conversing at ease in the garden's green bosom,
Like those who, when Florence was yet in her glories,
Cheated death and kill'd time with Boccaccian stories.
But at length the long twilight more deeply grew shaded,
And the fair night the rosy horizon invaded.
And the bee in the blossom, the bird on the bough,
Through the shadowy garden were slumbering now.
The trees only, o'er every unvisited walk,
Began on a sudden to whisper and talk.
And, as each little sprightly and garrulous leaf
Woke up with an evident sense of relief,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Could the hunter force a passage;
With his mittens and his snow-shoes
Vainly walked he through the forest,
Sought for bird or beast and found none,
Saw no track of deer or rabbit,
In the snow beheld no footprints,
In the ghastly, gleaming forest
Fell, and could not rise from weakness,
Perished there from cold and hunger.
Oh the famine and the fever!
Oh the wasting of the famine!
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing another
encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked of her had
been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not
done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had
endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how
he had figured to her. "What, exactly, was the account I gave--?"
"Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you
had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you,
the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly
prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you,
that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of,
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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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: animals, Peachia hastata (Pl. XII. Fig. 1), which differs from most
other British Actiniae in this, that instead of having like them a
walking disc, it has a free open lower end, with which (I know not
how) it buries itself upright in the sand, with its mouth just
above the surface. The figure on the left of the plate represents
a curious cluster of papillae which project from one side of the
mouth, and are the opening of the oviduct. But his value consists,
not merely in his beauty (though that, really, is not small), but
in his belonging to what the long word-makers call an
"interosculant" group, - a party of genera and species which
connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link
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