Today's Stichomancy for Robert E. Lee

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare:

Farewell deare father.

Exit

Enter Father Capulet, Mother, Nurse, and Seruing men, two or three.

Cap. So many guests inuite as here are writ, Sirrah, go hire me twenty cunning Cookes

Ser. You shall haue none ill sir, for Ile trie if they can licke their fingers

Cap. How canst thou trie them so? Ser. Marrie sir, 'tis an ill Cooke that cannot licke his owne fingers: therefore he that cannot licke his fingers

Romeo and Juliet

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner:

conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction the human horizon--all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible;

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Brother of Daphne by Dornford Yates:

coffee if I give it you."

"If you give it me."

I drew up the thong and followed her into the room. She motioned me to sit in a deep chair and put cigarettes by my side. Then she lighted the lamps that were set beneath two little silver coffee-pots, standing on a tray on the gate-table. I watched her in silence. When the lamps were burning, she turned and seated herself on the table as I had seen her first. She regarded me curiously, swinging that little right leg.

"I shouldn't have liked you to think me unkind," she said, with a grave smile.

The Brother of Daphne

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 Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac:

out of a clump of jessamine--gold on a white ground, colors which must send a thrill through any scion of the Moors. At ten o'clock I start for my lessons, which last till four, when I return for dinner. Afterwards I read and smoke till I go to bed.

I can put up for a long time with a life like this, compounded of work and meditation, of solitude and society. Be happy, therefore, Fernand; my abdication has brought no afterthoughts; I have no regrets like Charles V., no longing to try the game again like Napoleon. Five days and nights have passed since I wrote my will; to my mind they might have been five centuries. Honor, titles, wealth, are for me as though they had never existed.