| 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: of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of talent, one of
the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was a kind of
relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking--
being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had
been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot
now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe
occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first
images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.
This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read
alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she
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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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: nobody else interests me. Nor am I making any demands on life. In
all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental
attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed
of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain
to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so
imperfect.
Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I
knew it, by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart.
My temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim
with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.
Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and
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