Today's Stichomancy for William Shakespeare

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov:

pace. A stone lay upon my heart. To my eyes the sun seemed dim, its beams were powerless to warm me.

I did not ride up to the village, but turned to the right, along the gorge. The sight of a man would have been painful to me: I wanted to be alone. Throwing down the bridle and letting my head fall on my breast, I rode for a long time, and at length found myself in a spot with which I was wholly unfamiliar. I turned my horse back and began to search for the road. The sun had al-

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton:

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

"Oh, he doesn't HAVE to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself," she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its famille-verte vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.

"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the house."

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad:

don't mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough, in all conscience, the commotion of his little world had seemed a very considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and retrospect meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by voices now for ever still; finding things to say that an assailed boy could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I

Some Reminiscences

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 Ivanhoe by Walter Scott:

moment of your life would be embittered with regret for denying that which I ask of you.''

The noble and solemn air with which Rebecca made this appeal, gave it double weight with the fair Saxon.

``The man is old and feeble,'' she said to her guardian, ``the maiden young and beautiful, their friend sick and in peril of his life---Jews though they be, we cannot as Christians leave them in this extremity. Let them unload two of the sumpter-mules, and put the baggage behind two of the serfs.

Ivanhoe