The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: is a feeling which separates me from this age, and links me with
that to which I am hastening; and even when it seems, as now, to
lead me to the brink of the grave, and bid me gaze on it, I do
not love that it should be dispelled. It soothes my imagination,
without influencing my reason or conduct."
"I profess, my good lady," replied I, "that had any one but you
made such a declaration, I should have thought it as capricious
as that of the clergyman, who, without vindicating his false
reading, preferred, from habit's sake, his old Mumpsimus to the
modern Sumpsimus."
"Well," answered my aunt, "I must explain my inconsistency in
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: been closed SINCE his former visitation, the matter probably of a
quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the
wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding
his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely it had been
SUBSEQUENTLY closed - that is it had been on his previous passage
indubitably open!
He took it full in the face that something had happened between -
that he couldn't have noticed before (by which he meant on his
original tour of all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier
had exceptionally presented itself. He had indeed since that
moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have
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