| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: His business often called him to New York,
and he had kept an apartment there for years,
subletting it when he went abroad for any length of time.
Besides his sleeping-room and bath, there was a
large room, formerly a painter's studio, which he
used as a study and office. It was furnished
with the cast-off possessions of his bachelor
days and with odd things which he sheltered
for friends of his who followed itinerant and
more or less artistic callings. Over the fireplace
there was a large old-fashioned gilt mirror.
Alexander's Bridge |
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 Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: learned men, and among the rest by Socrates himself, whom I look
upon as undoubtedly the wisest of uninspir'd mortals: To which if
we add, that those who have condemned this art, though otherwise
learned, having been such as either did not apply their studies
this way, or at least did not succeed in their applications;
their testimony will not be of much weight to its disadvantage,
since they are liable to the common objection of condemning what
they did not understand.
Nor am I at all offended, or think it an injury to the art, when
I see the common dealers in it, the students in astrology, the
philomaths, and the rest of that tribe, treated by wise men with
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