| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: superior to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that "he is
witty." Genius always presupposes moral insight. This insight may
be applied to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must
be able to see the sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has
saved ask, "How is the Emperor?" could say, "The courtier is
alive; the man will follow!"--that man is not merely a surgeon or
a physician, he is prodigiously witty also. Hence a patient and
diligent student of human nature will admit Desplein's exorbitant
pretensions, and believe--as he himself believed--that he might
have been no less great as a minister than he was as a surgeon.
Among the riddles which Desplein's life presents to many of his
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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 Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: "Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no
railroads or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of
water before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."
"Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"
Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.
"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the
sand for about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around
it, and this here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument.
They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man
has ever been on top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and
straight up, like a wall. The Indians say that hundreds of years
 The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |