Today's Stichomancy for Kelsey Grammer

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

Which fortified her visage from the sun, Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw The carcase of a beauty spent and done. Time had not scythed all that youth begun, Nor youth all quit; but, spite of Heaven's fell rage Some beauty peeped through lattice of sear'd age.

Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne, Which on it had conceited characters, Laund'ring the silken figures in the brine That season'd woe had pelleted in tears, And often reading what contents it bears;

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

roughly meeting the cases of individuals; and some of them he will deliver in writing, and others will be unwritten; and these last will be traditional customs of the country.

YOUNG SOCRATES: He will be right.

STRANGER: Yes, quite right; for how can he sit at every man's side all through his life, prescribing for him the exact particulars of his duty? Who, Socrates, would be equal to such a task? No one who really had the royal science, if he had been able to do this, would have imposed upon himself the restriction of a written law.

YOUNG SOCRATES: So I should infer from what has now been said.

STRANGER: Or rather, my good friend, from what is going to be said.

Statesman

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

And one that he had long reviled As fit for devils, not for seers. Where, then, was there a place for him That on this other side of death Saw nothing good, as he had seen No good come out of Nazareth?

Yet here there was a reticence, And I believe his only one, That hushed him as if he beheld A Presence that would not be gone. In such a silence he confessed

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 Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

That He should weep for me? . . . Was it you, Mary?" The questions held in his incredulous eyes Were more than she would see. She looked away; But she had felt them and should feel for ever, She thought, their cold and lonely desperation That had the bitterness of all cold things That were not cruel. "I should have wept," he said, "If I had been the Master. . . ."

Now she could feel His hands above her hair -- the same black hair That once he made a jest of, praising it,