| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon
the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river.
Captain Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says--
'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without
seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting
of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.'
The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago,
the old original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists,
pioneer, head of the procession, ended his weary and tedious
discovery-voyage down the solemn stretches of the great river--
La Salle, whose name will last as long as the river itself shall last.
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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 Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: enormous hat-shaped cloud rolling from the summit of the volcano.
Herbert immediately apprised the colonists, who at once joined him in
watching the summit of Mount Franklin.
"Ah!" exclaimed Pencroft, "those are not vapors this time! It seems to me
that the giant is not content with breathing; he must smoke!"
This figure of speech employed by the sailor exactly expressed the
changes going on at the mouth of the volcano. Already for three months had
the crater emitted vapors more or less dense, but which were as yet
produced only by an internal ebullition of mineral substances. But now the
vapors were replaced by a thick smoke, rising in the form of a grayish
column, more than three hundred feet in width at its base, and which spread
 The Mysterious Island |