Today's Stichomancy for Theodore Roosevelt

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

the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall:

But we showed that it was only necessary to substitute, in whole or in part, carbonate of iron for carbonate of lime, thus changing the magnetic but not the optical character of the crystal, to cause the axis to be attracted. That the deportment of magnetic crystals is exactly antithetical to that of diamagnetic crystals isomorphous with the magnetic ones, was proved to be a general law of action. In all cases, the line which in a diamagnetic crystal set equatorially, always set itself in an isomorphous magnetic crystal axially. By mechanical compression other bodies were also made to imitate the Iceland spar.

These and numerous other results bearing upon the question were

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon:

It is most quickly burnished; it is least readily soiled.[5]

[4] Cf. Aristoph. "Acharn." 320, and the note of the scholiast.

[5] See Ps. Plut. "Moral." 238 F.

He futher permitted those who were above the age of early manhood to wear their hair long.[6] For so, he conceived, they would appear of larger stature, more free and indomitable, and of a more terrible aspect.

[6] See Plut. "Lycurg." 22 (Clough, i. 114).

So furnished and accoutred, he divided his citizen soldiers into six morai[7] (or regimental divisions) of cavalry[8] and heavy infantry. Each of these citizen regiments (political divisions) has one

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 Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson:

A limb was broken when they lifted him; And while he lay recovering there, his wife Bore him another son, a sickly one: Another hand crept too across his trade Taking her bread and theirs: and on him fell, Altho' a grave and staid God-fearing man, Yet lying thus inactive, doubt and gloom. He seem'd, as in a nightmare of the night, To see his children leading evermore Low miserable lives of hand-to-mouth, And her, he loved, a beggar: then he pray'd