| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: maintain their young. Man may be supposed to act thus from reason; but why
should animals have these passionate feelings? Can you tell me why?'
Again I replied that I did not know. She said to me: 'And do you expect
ever to become a master in the art of love, if you do not know this?' 'But
I have told you already, Diotima, that my ignorance is the reason why I
come to you; for I am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the
cause of this and of the other mysteries of love.' 'Marvel not,' she said,
'if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times
acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal
nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal:
and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always
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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 Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which
trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill
of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of
the person, and frequent although transient affections of a
partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis.
Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her
malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the
closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she
succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible
agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I
 The Fall of the House of Usher |