Today's Stichomancy for Hans Christian Andersen

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare:

And comely-distant sits he by her side; When he again desires her, being sat, Her grievance with his hearing to divide: If that from him there may be aught applied Which may her suffering ecstasy assuage, 'Tis promised in the charity of age.

'Father,' she says, 'though in me you behold The injury of many a blasting hour, Let it not tell your judgement I am old; Not age, but sorrow, over me hath power: I might as yet have been a spreading flower,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy:

her melancholy was just like the august melancholy she showed at the mention of her most august Majesty the Empress Marya Fedorovna. Pierre felt flattered by this. Anna Pavlovna arranged the different groups in her drawing room with her habitual skill. The large group, in which were Prince Vasili and the generals, had the benefit of the diplomat. Another group was at the tea table. Pierre wished to join the former, but Anna Pavlovna- who was in the excited condition of a commander on a battlefield to whom thousands of new and brilliant ideas occur which there is hardly time to put in action- seeing Pierre, touched his sleeve with her finger, saying:

"Wait a bit, I have something in view for you this evening." (She

War and Peace

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius:

forth in the chill darkness to milk and chore, still rankled. Those tangy frosty afternoons, when he had been forced to clean barns and plow while the other boys went rabbit and possum hunting or nutting, were afternoons whose loss he still mourned. Nothing had yet atoned for the evenings when he had been torn from his reading and sent sternly to bed because he must get up so early. Always work had stolen from him these treasures--dreams, recreation and knowledge. He had been obliged to fight the farm and his father for even a modicum of them--the things that made life worth living. And the irony of it--that eventually it would be this farm and Martin's driving methods

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 Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair:

reveals no mention of the revelations concerning Mr. Baxter--not even any mention of the $400,000 slush fund of its paragon, of transportation virtues? I asked that question in my letter, and the president of the "Outlook" Company for some reason failed to notice it. I wrote a second time, courteously reminding him of the omission; and also of another, equally significant--he had not informed me whether any of the editors of the "Outlook", or the officers or directors of the Company, were stockholders in the New Haven. His final reply was that the questions seem to him "wholly unimportant"; he does not know whether the "Outlook" published anything about the Baxter revelations, nor does he know