Today's Stichomancy for Jane Seymour

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

The rotten brick decayed to dust; The iron was consumed by rust; Each tabid and perverted mansion Hung in the article of declension.

So forty, fifty, sixty passed; Until, when seventy came at last, The occupant of number three Called friends to hold a jubilee. Wild was the night; the charging rack Had forced the moon upon her back; The wind piped up a naval ditty;

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft:

for these incomplete yet high-souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins -- sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.

Herbert West: Reanimator

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac:

drain our poor father, a thousand francs at a time, till he is left as you see him now? That is all your doing, sister! I myself have seen my father as often as I could. I have not turned him out of the house, and then come and fawned upon him when I wanted money. I did not so much as know that he had spent those twelve thousand francs on me. I am economical, as you know; and when papa has made me presents, it has never been because I came and begged for them."

"You were better off than I. M. de Marsay was rich, as you have reason to know. You always were as slippery as gold. Good-bye; I have neither sister nor----"

Father Goriot

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 Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson:

To render again and receive!

I KNOW not how it is with you - I love the first and last, The whole field of the present view, The whole flow of the past.

One tittle of the things that are, Nor you should change nor I - One pebble in our path - one star In all our heaven of sky.

Our lives, and every day and hour,