The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: only in the great Christian poet, the consciousness of a moral law,
through which "the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make
instruments to scourge us;" and of the resolved arbitration of the
destinies, that conclude into precision of doom what we feebly and
blindly began; and force us, when our indiscretion serves us, and
our deepest plots do pall, to the confession, that "there's a
divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will."
Is not this a mystery of life?
Be it so, then. About this human life that is to be, or that is,
the wise religious men tell us nothing that we can trust; and the
wise contemplative men, nothing that can give us peace. But there
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but
lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the
building firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself
quite "standing up" to this personage over a failure on the
latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted
conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever
so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she
had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of
irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real
gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the
inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would
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