Today's Stichomancy for Ken Nordine

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

Such civil war is in my love and hate, That I an accessary needs must be, To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

XXXVI

Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one: So shall those blots that do with me remain, Without thy help, by me be borne alone. In our two loves there is but one respect, Though in our lives a separable spite, Which though it alter not love's sole effect,

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:

making a popular - or shall we say vulgar? - sort of society verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a supper party waited for its laureate's word; but on the appearance of Burns, this coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues, and learned gravity of thought and natural pathos.

What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style, and to walk on his own feet instead of on academical stilts. There was never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means; and we may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton:

with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs. Gryce to extract his promise about the overshoes, so little likely was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain. After attaining his majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels, the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another large property passed into her son's hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his "interests" demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his

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 Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman:

overgrown school-boy.

"Hullo, Eudora," he said again.

"Hullo," said she, falteringly.

It was inconceivable that they should meet in such wise after the years of separation and longing which they had both undergone; but each took refuge, as it were, in a long-past youth, even childhood, from the fierce tension of age. When they were both children they had been accustomed to pass each other on the village street with exactly such salutation, and now both reverted to it. The tall, regal woman in her India shawl and the stout, middle-aged man had both stepped back to their