| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: gravel and stones, the whole of the massive forests.
And what went on in this gigantic crucible, where all this
vegetable matter had accumulated, sunk to various depths?
A regular chemical operation, a sort of distillation.
All the carbon contained in these vegetables had agglomerated,
and little by little coal was forming under the double influence
of enormous pressure and the high temperature maintained by
the internal fires, at this time so close to it.
Thus there was one kingdom substituted for another in this
slow but irresistible reaction. The vegetable was transformed
into a mineral. Plants which had lived the vegeta-tive
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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 Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: musician's nationality was revealed.
"We find France everywhere, it seems," said one of the men.
The General had left the church during the Te Deum; he could not
listen any longer. The nun's music had been a revelation of a
woman loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the
world's eyes, so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that
hitherto the most ingenious and persistent efforts made by men
who brought great influence and unusual powers to bear upon the
search had failed to find her. The suspicion aroused in the
General's heart became all but a certainty with the vague
reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of Fleuve du
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