Today's Stichomancy for James Legge

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

The strings that Nero fingered are all gone.

III

We cannot crown ourselves with everything, Nor can we coax the Fates for us to quarrel: No matter what we are, or what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel.

The World

Some are the brothers of all humankind, And own them, whatsoever their estate; And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind With enmity for man's unguarded fate.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato:

we say about the rest? First, ask the pleasures--they will be too happy to dwell with wisdom. Secondly, ask the arts and sciences--they reply that the excesses of intemperance are the ruin of them; and that they would rather only have the pleasures of health and temperance, which are the handmaidens of virtue. But still we want truth? That is now added; and so the argument is complete, and may be compared to an incorporeal law, which is to hold fair rule over a living body. And now we are at the vestibule of the good, in which there are three chief elements--truth, symmetry, and beauty. These will be the criterion of the comparative claims of pleasure and wisdom.

Which has the greater share of truth? Surely wisdom; for pleasure is the

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe:

is still, remarkable particularly, above all the parishes in London, for a great number of alleys and thoroughfares, very long, into which no carts could come, and where they were obliged to go and fetch the bodies a very long way; which alleys now remain to witness it, such as White's Alley, Cross Key Court, Swan Alley, Bell Alley, White Horse Alley, and many more. Here they went with a kind of hand- barrow and laid the dead bodies on it, and carried them out to the carts; which work he performed and never had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. His wife at the same time was a nurse to infected people, and tended many that died in the parish, being for her

A Journal of the Plague Year

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 Tanach:

Exodus 26: 17 Two tenons shall there be in each board, joined one to another; thus shalt thou make for all the boards of the tabernacle.

Exodus 26: 18 And thou shalt make the boards for the tabernacle, twenty boards for the south side southward:

Exodus 26: 19 And thou shalt make forty sockets of silver under the twenty boards: two sockets under one board for its two tenons, and two sockets under another board for its two tenons;

Exodus 26: 20 and for the second side of the tabernacle, on the north side, twenty boards.

Exodus 26: 21 And their forty sockets of silver: two sockets under one board, and two sockets under another board.

Exodus 26: 22 And for the hinder part of the tabernacle westward thou shalt make six boards.

Exodus 26: 23 And two boards shalt thou make for the corners of the tabernacle in the hinder part.

Exodus 26: 24 And they shall be double beneath, and in like manner they shall be complete unto the top thereof unto the first ring; thus shall it be for them both; they shall be for the two corners.

Exodus 26: 25 Thus there shall be eight boards, and their sockets of silver, sixteen sockets: two sockets under one board, and two sockets under another board.

Exodus 26: 26 And thou shalt make bars of acacia-wood: five for the boards of the one side of the tabernacle,

The Tanach