| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: faithful race cherish his memory.
Misunderstood and traduced in life, the glory of his achievement
has vindicated the purity of his motives. He belongs to history.
But there were others--obscure adventurers who had not his
advantages of birth, position, and intelligence; who had only his
sympathy with the people of forests and sea he understood and
loved so well. They can not be said to be forgotten since they
have not been known at all. They were lost in the common crowd of
seamen-traders of the Archipelago, and if they emerged from their
obscurity it was only to be condemned as law-breakers. Their
lives were thrown away for a cause that had no right to exist in
The Rescue |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: should be sincerely expressing his nature in alluding to the fact
in terms of such outrageous flippancy. Not quite to such an extent
was he the incarnation of Scaramouche. But sufficiently was he so
ever to mask his true feelings by an arresting gesture, his true
thoughts by an effective phrase. He was the actor always, a man
ever calculating the effect he would produce, ever avoiding
self-revelation, ever concerned to overlay his real character by
an assumed and quite fictitious one. There was in this something
of impishness, and something of other things.
Nobody laughed now at his flippancy. He did not intend that
anybody should. He intended to be terrible; and he knew that the
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