| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha, actually
waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a
brocade. Quaint tributary little brooks babble and
murmur down through these trees, down through
these lawns. A blessed warm sun hums with the joy
of innumerable bees. To right hand and to left,
in front of you and behind, rising sheer, forbidding,
impregnable, the cliffs, mountains, and ranges hem
you in. Down the river ten miles you can go: then
the gorge closes, the river grows savage, you can only
look down the tumbling fierce waters and turn back.
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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 Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: rain failed and there was no harvest. Their present famine is an
act of man. Labor ceased. And the ensuing hunger was man's own
fault. Nations that think labor is a curse, and adopt schemes to
avoid labor, must perish for their folly.
In 1896 we came within an inch of adopting financial
bolshevism. This taught me that a people are poorly schooled who
can not tell the good from the bad. The wise heads knew what was
good for the country. Hard work and good crops would cure our
ills. But millions voted for a poison that would have destroyed
us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind of school, not the
kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly between good and
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