Today's Stichomancy for Rebecca Gayheart

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

A larger garden first. But you today Are for the larger sowing; and your seed, A little mixed, will have, as He foresaw, The foreign harvest of a wider growth, And one without an end. Many there are, And are to be, that shall partake of it, Though none may share it with an understanding That is not his alone. We are all alone; And yet we are all parcelled of one order -- Jew, Gentile, or barbarian in the dark Of wildernesses that are not so much

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato:

SOCRATES: And now what is the next question, and how came we hither? Were we not enquiring whether the second place belonged to pleasure or wisdom?

PROTARCHUS: We were.

SOCRATES: And now, having determined these points, shall we not be better able to decide about the first and second place, which was the original subject of dispute?

PROTARCHUS: I dare say.

SOCRATES: We said, if you remember, that the mixed life of pleasure and wisdom was the conqueror--did we not?

PROTARCHUS: True.

SOCRATES: And we see what is the place and nature of this life and to what

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

Etienne brought flowers on the morrow, ordering his people to find rare ones, as his mother had done in earlier days for him. Who knows the depths to which the roots of a feeling reach in the soul of a solitary being thus returning to the traditions of mother-love in order to bestow upon a woman the same caressing devotion with which his mother had charmed his life? To him, what grandeur in these nothings wherein were blended his only two affections. Flowers and music thus became the language of their love. Gabrielle replied to Etienne's gifts by nosegays of her own,--nosegays which told the wise old doctor that his ignorant daughter already knew enough. The material ignorance of these two lovers was like a dark background on

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 1492 by Mary Johntson:

Spaniards where once had stood fivescore. Luis Torres sat with me and he told me of Indian war,--of Anacaona hanged and Cotubanama hanged, of eighty caciques burned or hanged, of _peace_ at last. Now the Indians worked the mines, and scraped the sands of every stream, and likewise planted cotton and maize for the conquerors. They were gathered in _repartimentios, encomiendas_, parceled out, so many to every Spaniard with power. The old word ``gods'' had gone out of use. ``Master'' was now the plain and accurate term.

The Governor was a shrewd, political, strong man,--not