| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: mighty current, whose source seemed to be in the very beginning
of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered as they went all
the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor. Life in all
its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the
spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been
familiar.
"As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna
seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the
folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with
the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all
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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 Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful
things will be made by the individual. This is not merely
necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get
either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things
for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their
wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put
into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a
community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of
any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art
either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates
into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique
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