| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: and diseases from the more laborious duties of society. In
monasteries the weak and timorous may be happily sheltered, the
weary may repose, and the penitent may meditate. Those retreats of
prayer and contemplation have something so congenial to the mind of
man, that perhaps there is scarcely one that does not purpose to
close his life in pious abstraction, with a few associates serious
as himself."
"Such," said Pekuah, "has often been my wish, and I have heard the
Princess declare that she should not willingly die in a crowd."
"The liberty of using harmless pleasures," proceeded Imlac, "will
not be disputed, but it is still to be examined what pleasures are
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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 Pupil by Henry James: felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much
in what form it would find its liveliest effect.
Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal - a frightened
sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they
were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for
something they didn't find. The Dorringtons hadn't re-appeared,
the princes had scattered; wasn't that the beginning of the end?
Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous "days"; her social
calendar was blurred - it had turned its face to the wall.
Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been
the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know
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