| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: of justice! What an insult to the distinguished youth, the ambitions
native to the soil of France! We looked upon these things as upon a
spectacle, and groaned over them, without taking upon ourselves to
act.
Juste, whom no one ever sought, and who never sought any one, was, at
five-and-twenty, a great politician, a man with a wonderful aptitude
for apprehending the correlation between remote history and the facts
of the present and of the future. In 1831, he told me exactly what
would and did happen--the murders, the conspiracies, the ascendency of
the Jews, the difficulty of doing anything in France, the scarcity of
talent in the higher circles, and the abundance of intellect in the
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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 Talisman by Walter Scott: the holy Prophet shall dispose to submit themselves to his law?
violence and bribery are alike alien to his plan for extending
the true faith. Hearken to me, my brother. When the blind man
was miraculously restored to sight, the scales dropped from his
eyes at the Divine pleasure. Think'st thou that any earthly
leech could have removed them? No. Such mediciner might have
tormented the patient with his instruments, or perhaps soothed
him with his balsams and cordials, but dark as he was must the
darkened man have remained; and it is even so with the blindness
of the understanding. If there be those among the Franks who,
for the sake of worldly lucre, have assumed the turban of the
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