Today's Stichomancy for T. S. Eliot

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson:

intelligence was closed; so Dick tore himself off by force, and, shouting a good-bye, made off along the lane to Thymebury.

CHAPTER IX - IN WHICH THE LIBERAL EDITOR RE-APPEARS AS 'DEUS EX MACHINA'

IT was perhaps a week later, as old Mr. Naseby sat brooding in his study, that there was shown in upon him, on urgent business, a little hectic gentleman shabbily attired.

'I have to ask pardon for this intrusion, Mr. Naseby,' he said; 'but I come here to perform a duty. My card has been sent in, but perhaps you may not know, what it does not tell

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy:

flush of excitement. "I felt that I must call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I had not been thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I cannot get rid of your image, try how I may! It is hard that a good woman should do harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only pray for me, Tess!"

The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet Tess did not pity him.

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?"

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac:

treated me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating my self- respect at every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his experience, and in convicting me of total ignorance. He wounded me on all occasions. He did everything to make me detest him and to give me the right to betray him; but I was still the dupe of my own hope and of my desire to do right through several years. Shall I tell you the cruel saying that drove me to further follies? 'The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse has gone back to her husband,' said the world. 'Bah! it is always a triumph to bring the dead to life; it is all she can now do,' replied my best friend, a relation, she, at whose house I met you--"

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 Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley:

nothing is made - 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Shall we quarrel with physical science, if she gives us evidence that those words are true?"

And - understand it well - the grand passage I have just quoted need not be accused of substituting "natural selection for God." In any case natural selection would be only the means or law by which God works, as He does by other natural laws. We do not substitute gravitation for God, when we say that the planets are sustained in their orbits by the law of gravitation. The theory about natural selection may be untrue, or imperfect, as may the modern theories of the "evolution and progress" of organic forms: