Today's Stichomancy for Leonardo da Vinci

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady-boarders, - the same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a few original stanzas, not remembering that "The Pactolian" pays me five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.

"Madam," said I, (she and the century were in their teens together,) "all men are bores, except when we want them. There never was but one man whom I would trust with my latch-key."

"Who might that favored person be?"

"Zimmermann."

- The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney,

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius:

Feigning the like with all the rest of stuff. Yet he concedes not any void in things, Nor any limit to cutting bodies down. Wherefore to me he seems on both accounts To err no less than those we named before. Add too: these germs he feigns are far too frail- If they be germs primordial furnished forth With but same nature as the things themselves, And travail and perish equally with those, And no rein curbs them from annihilation. For which will last against the grip and crush

Of The Nature of Things

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll:

I need not ask you to recall How tenderly I sympathised!

'Then the advice I've poured on you, So full of wisdom and of wit: All given gratis, though 'tis true I might have fairly charged for it! But I refrain from mentioning Full many a deed I might relate For boasting is a kind of thing That I particularly hate.

[Image...'I will lend you fifty more!']

Sylvie and Bruno

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 Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley:

when we have babbled together of Utopian governments in days which are now dreams to me, that I would have all officers of state chosen by lot out of the wisest and most fit; so making sure that they should be called by God, and not by man alone. Gentlemen, do you agree to Sir John's advice?"

They agreed, seeing no better counsel, and John put three slips of paper into Frank's hand, with the simple old apostolic prayer--

"Show which of us three Thou hast chosen."

The lot fell upon Amyas Leigh.

Frank shuddered, and clasped his hands over his face.

"Well," said Cary, "I have ill-luck to-night: but Frank goes at