| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: how to express it, then said simply - "all wrong."
"Come once again," he pleaded.
"Will you give him his candle?" she asked.
He waited, but only because it would sound ungracious; not because
of a doubt of his feeling. "I can't do that!" he declared at last.
"Then good-bye." And she gave him her hand again.
He had got his dismissal; besides which, in the agitation of
everything that had opened out to him, he felt the need to recover
himself as he could only do in solitude. Yet he lingered -
lingered to see if she had no compromise to express, no attenuation
to propose. But he only met her great lamenting eyes, in which
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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 Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: utterly detestable things singing birds were. A. blackbird had
gripped his attention. Never had he heard such vain repetitions.
He struggled against the dark mood of criticism. "He prayeth best
who loveth best--"
No, he did not love the birds. It was useless to pretend.
Whatever one may say about other birds a cuckoo is a low
detestable cad of a bird.
Then the bishop began to be particularly tormented by a bird
that made a short, insistent, wheezing sound at regular intervals
of perhaps twenty seconds. If a bird could have whooping-cough,
that, he thought, was the sort of whoop it would have. But even
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