| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: answer, that, if one may judge of the great genius or inventions of
the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have
countenance to bear you out in boasting of either. Erect your
schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet, if the
materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the
guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at last in a
cobweb; the duration of which, like that of other spiders' webs,
may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a
corner. For anything else of genuine that the Moderns may pretend
to, I cannot recollect; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and
satire, much of a nature and substance with the spiders' poison;
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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 Summer by Edith Wharton: change of feeling. But she had no means of finding out
whether some act of hostility on his part had made the
young man stay away, or whether he simply wished to
avoid seeing her again after their drive back from the
brown house. She ate her supper with a studied show of
indifference, but she knew that Mr. Royall was watching
her and that her agitation did not escape him.
After supper she went up to her room. She heard Mr.
Royall cross the passage, and presently the sounds
below her window showed that he had returned to the
porch. She seated herself on her bed and began to
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