| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: for his material. And then it was not worth many thanks in any
case.
For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in
our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious
continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo. This story to
be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South
Seas. But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the
consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak -
just as it was told to me - but unfortunately robbed of the
striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that
ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port
 Within the Tides |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: I had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when
at length my fuel was housed, I came near selling it to the
ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry is, in
itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to
the worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have
not, as Thoreau says, "earned money merely," but money,
health, delight, and moral profit, all in one. "We must heap
up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he
says in another place; and then exclaims, "How admirably the
artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to
his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote
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