Today's Stichomancy for Enrico Fermi

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton:

those flying folds of her drapery?"

"After a storm in autumn have you never seen--"

"Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters-- the perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose, Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli--"

"I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it."

"Have you never thought--"

"Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had."

"But surely you must have felt--"

"Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--"

"How beautiful! How strange--"

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The White Moll by Frank L. Packard:

clever to have beaten the police the way she has for the last few years; and - er - I worship at the shrine of cleverness - especially if it be a woman's. The idea struck me last night that if she and I should - er - pool our resources, we should not have to complain of the reward."

"Oh, so youse wants to work wid her, eh?" sniffed Rhoda Gray. "So dat's it, is it?"

"Partially," he said. "But, quite apart from that, the reason I want to find her is because she is in very great danger. Clever as she is, it is a very different matter to-day now that the police have found her out. She has been forced into hiding, and, if alone

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley:

wonder it has not been called, like the plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and yet an instrument so simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till the latter part of the fifteenth century. Yes, a great genius was he, and the consequent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering race, who first invented for himself and his children after him a--bow and arrow.

The next--whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak of him in second place--was the man who was the potential ancestor of the whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of

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 Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso:

I longed to leave this wandering pilgrimage, And in my native soil again to won, To get some seely home I had desire, Loth still to warm me at another's fire.

XXXIV "To Egypt-ward, where I was born, I went, And bore thee with me, by a rolling flood, Till I with savage thieves well-nigh was hent; Before the brook, the thieves behind me stood: Thee to forsake I never could consent, And gladly would I 'scape those outlaws wood,