| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: d'Angouleme on his return from Spain.
The widest part of the Rue du Tourniquet was the end opening into the
Rue de la Tixeranderie, and even there it was less than six feet
across. Hence in rainy weather the gutter water was soon deep at the
foot of the old houses, sweeping down with it the dust and refuse
deposited at the corner-stones by the residents. As the dust-carts
could not pass through, the inhabitants trusted to storms to wash
their always miry alley; for how could it be clean? When the summer
sun shed its perpendicular rays on Paris like a sheet of gold, but as
piercing as the point of a sword, it lighted up the blackness of this
street for a few minutes without drying the permanent damp that rose
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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 Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: millions of years I have devoted night and day to that study. But
the idea of learning the customs of the whole appalling expanse of
heaven - O man, how insanely you talk! Now I don't doubt that this
odd costume you talk about is the fashion in that district of
heaven you belong to, but you won't be conspicuous in this section
without it."
I felt all right, if that was the case, so I bade him good-day and
left. All day I walked towards the far end of a prodigious hall of
the office, hoping to come out into heaven any moment, but it was a
mistake. That hall was built on the general heavenly plan - it
naturally couldn't be small. At last I got so tired I couldn't go
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