Today's Stichomancy for David Beckham

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde:

From some lone bird disconsolate; A corncrake calling to its mate; The answer from the misty hill.

And suddenly the moon withdraws Her sickle from the lightening skies, And to her sombre cavern flies, Wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.

Poem: The Grave Of Keats

Rid of the world's injustice, and his pain, He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue: Taken from life when life and love were new

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture -- genius -- learning -- wit -- books -- paintings -- statuary -- music -- philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do -- not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and

Walden

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

And shrinks from what will not occur, Bequeathing with infirm derision His ashes to the days that were, Before she made him prisoner; And labors to retrieve the vision That he must once have had of her.

He waits, and there awaits an ending, And he knows neither what nor when; But no magicians are attending To make him see as he saw then, And he will never find again

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 Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac:

Meantime the two friends went out to dinner together, perhaps for the first time in their lives. For Schmucke it was a return to the Fatherland; for Johann Graff of the Hotel du Rhin and his daughter Emilie, Wolfgang Graff the tailor and his wife, Fritz Brunner and Wilhelm Schwab, were Germans, and Pons and the notary were the only Frenchmen present at the banquet. The Graffs of the tailor's business owned a splendid house in the Rue de Richelieu, between the Rue Neuve- des-Petits-Champs and the Rue Villedo; they had brought up their niece, for Emilie's father, not without reason, had feared contact with the very mixed society of an inn for his daughter. The good tailor Graffs, who loved Emilie as if she had been their own daughter,