Today's Stichomancy for Julia Roberts

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac:

and more than I should wish in brilliant and generous natures; it is gallantry after the fashion of the Marechal de Richelieu, high spirits and frolic carried rather too far; perhaps we may see in it the /outrances/ of another age, the Eighteenth Century pushed to extremes; it harks back to the Musketeers; it is an exploit stolen from Champcenetz; nay, such light-hearted inconstancy takes us back to the festooned and ornate period of the old court of the Valois. In an age as moral as the present, we are bound to regard audacity of this kind sternly; still, at the same time that 'cornet of sugar-plums' may serve to warn young girls of the perils of lingering where fancies, more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy

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

his boyhood upwards, thirsted for glory, and beyond all contemporary names won what he desired; who, being gifted with a nature most emulous of honour, remained from the moment he was king unconquered; who attained the fullest term of mortal life and died without offence[4] committed, whether as concerning those at whose head he marched, or as towards those others against whom he fought in war.

[3] See Symonds' "Greek Poets," ch. v.

[4] As to the word {anamartetos} so translated, see Breitenbach, Exc. ad x. 4 of his edition.

It only remains for me, under the form of headings,[1] to review the

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London:

larboard bowlines on deck!" being shouted down into the forecastle of a present day ship. Yet that was the call used on the Pilgrim to fetch Dana and the rest of his watch on deck.

The chronometer, which is merely the least imperfect time-piece man has devised, makes possible the surest and easiest method by far of ascertaining longitude. Yet the Pilgrim sailed in a day when the chronometer was just coming into general use. So little was it depended upon that the Pilgrim carried only one, and that one, going wrong at the outset, was never used again. A navigator of the present would be aghast if asked to voyage for two years, from Boston, around the Horn to California, and back again,

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 Poems by Bronte Sisters:

The wind of winter sighs:

Now loud, it thunders o'er my head, And now in distance dies. But give me back my barren hills Where colder breezes rise;

Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees Can yield an answering swell, But where a wilderness of heath Returns the sound as well.

For yonder garden, fair and wide, With groves of evergreen,