| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into
the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be
pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough
to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and
that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial when
uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond
such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of
the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than
the movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this
weak side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A
peculiar density and mass, consequent on the nearness of the
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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 Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells: habits, is due to the mystery we make about these things."
"Not entirely," said the doctor.
"Largely. What child under a modern upbringing ever goes
through the stuffy horrors described in James Joyce's
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN."
"I've not read it."
"A picture of the Catholic atmosphere; a young soul shut up
in darkness and ignorance to accumulate filth. In the name of
purity and decency and under threats of hell fire."
"Horrible!"
"Quite. A study of intolerable tensions, the tensions that
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