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 The Death of the Lion by Henry James:

the manuscript to look over.'

"'She spoke, you mean, as if it were the morning paper?'

"Lady Augusta stared - my irony was lost on her. 'She didn't have time, so she gave me a chance first; because unfortunately I go to- morrow to Bigwood.'

"'And your chance has only proved a chance to lose it?'

"'I haven't lost it. I remember now - it was very stupid of me to have forgotten. I told my maid to give it to Lord Dorimont - or at least to his man.'

"'And Lord Dorimont went away directly after luncheon.'

"'Of course he gave it back to my maid - or else his man did,' said

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft:

excruciating despair, uttered in such wild tones of indescribable anguish as proved the total absence of reason, and roused phantoms of horror in her mind, far more terrific than all that dreaming superstition ever drew. Besides, there was frequently something so inconceivably picturesque in the varying gestures of unrestrained passion, so irresistibly comic in their sallies, or so heart-piercingly pathetic in the little airs they would sing, frequently bursting out after an awful silence, as to fascinate the attention, and amuse the fancy, while torturing the soul. It was the uproar of the passions which she was compelled to observe; and to mark the lucid beam of reason, like a light trembling in a

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare:

That in their smoky ranks his smother'd light May set at noon and make perpetual night.

'Were Tarquin night (as he is but night's child), The silver-shining queen he would distain; Her twinkling handmaids too, by him defil'd, Through Night's black bosom should not peep again: So should I have co-partners in my pain: And fellowship in woe doth woe assuage, As palmers' chat makes short their pilgrimage.

'Where now I have no one to blush with me, To cross their arms and hang their heads with mine,

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 Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

me -- not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less -- not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commerce to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of

Walden