| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: friends, or for not revealing some secret of their lives; (in friendship
too there must be reserves;) they do not intrude upon one another, and they
mutually rejoice in any good which happens to either of them, though it may
be to the loss of the other. They may live apart and have little
intercourse, but when they meet, the old tie is as strong as ever--
according to the common saying, they find one another always the same. The
greatest good of friendship is not daily intercourse, for circumstances
rarely admit of this; but on the great occasions of life, when the advice
of a friend is needed, then the word spoken in season about conduct, about
health, about marriage, about business,--the letter written from a distance
by a disinterested person who sees with clearer eyes may be of inestimable
 Lysis |
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 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Then we talked about the money. It was a pretty
good raise -- twenty dollars apiece. Jim said we could
take deck passage on a steamboat now, and the money
would last us as far as we wanted to go in the free
States. He said twenty mile more warn't far for the
raft to go, but he wished we was already there.
Towards daybreak we tied up, and Jim was mighty
particular about hiding the raft good. Then he worked
all day fixing things in bundles, and getting all ready
to quit rafting.
That night about ten we hove in sight of the lights
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |