Today's Stichomancy for Robert Downey Jr.

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

From the Biographical Notes of "The Second Book of Modern Verse" (1919, 1920), edited by Jessie B. Rittenhouse:

Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Born at Head Tide, Maine, Dec. 22, 1869. Educated at Harvard University. Mr. Robinson is a psychological poet of great subtlety; his poems are usually studies of types and he has given us a remarkable series of portraits. He is recognized as one of the finest and most distinguished poets of our time. His successive volumes are: "Children of the Night", 1897; "Captain Craig", 1902; "The Town Down the River", 1910; "The Man against the Sky", 1916; "Merlin", 1917; and "Launcelot", 1920. The last-named volume was awarded a prize of five hundred dollars,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale:

Who loves all beauty -- yet I wither it. Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath -- Forever since my maidenhood to sow Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep Their bitter care above me even now. It was the gods who led me to this lair, That tho' the burning winds should make me weak, They should not snatch the life from out my lips. Olympus let the other women die; They shall be quiet when the day is done And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon:

to God. Neither did they see that God ought to be served in those commandments which He Himself has given and not in commandments devised by men. A good and perfect kind of life is that which has for it the commandment of God. It is necessary to admonish men of these things.

And before these times, Gerson rebukes this error of the monks concerning perfection, and testifies that in his day it was a new saying that the monastic life is a state of perfection.

So many wicked opinions are inherent in the vows, namely, that they justify, that they constitute Christian perfection, that they keep the counsels and commandments, that they have works

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 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:

were saying, he felt on coming away from the Shtcherbatskys' that the secret spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had grown so much stronger that evening that some step must be taken.

But what step could and ought to be taken he could not imagine.

"What is so exquisite," he thought, as he returned from the Shtcherbatskys', carrying away with him, as he always did, a delicious feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from the fact that he had not been smoking for a whole evening, and with it a new feeling of tenderness at her love for him--"what is so exquisite is that not a word has been said by me or by her, but we understand each other so well in this unseen language of

Anna Karenina