Today's Stichomancy for Hans Christian Andersen

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken:

Your mouth has a humorous, tremulous, half-shy sweetness, Your eyes are April grey. . . .with jonquils in them?' No, if I tell at all, I shall tell in silence . . . I'll say--my childhood broke through chords of music --Or were they chords of sun?--wherein fell shadows, Or silences; I rose through seas of sunlight; Or sometimes found a darkness stooped above me With wings of death, and a face of cold clear beauty. . I lay in the warm sweet grass on a blue May morning, My chin in a dandelion, my hands in clover, And drowsed there like a bee. . . .blue days behind me

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw:

all their foulness, shall be more thought on than fair ones. _[To Shakespear, scolding at him]_ Deny it if thou canst. Oh, he is compact of lies and scorns. I am tired of being tossed up to heaven and dragged down to hell at every whim that takes him. I am ashamed to my very soul that I have abased myself to love one that my father would not have deemed fit to hold my stirrup--one that will talk to all the world about me--that will put my love and my shame into his plays and make me blush for myself there--that will write sonnets about me that no man of gentle strain would put his hand to. I am all disordered: I know not what I am saying to your Majesty: I am of all ladies most deject and wretched--

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde:

And honey-coloured amber beads our twining limbs will deck.'

But when that baffled Lord of War the Sun With gaudy pennon flying passed away Into his brazen House, and one by one The little yellow stars began to stray Across the field of heaven, ah! then indeed She feared his lips upon her lips would never care to feed,

And cried, 'Awake, already the pale moon Washes the trees with silver, and the wave Creeps grey and chilly up this sandy dune, The croaking frogs are out, and from the cave

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 The Augsburg Confession by Philip Melanchthon:

monastic life not only merited righteousness before God but even greater things, because it kept not only the precepts, but also the so-called "evangelical counsels."

Thus they made men believe that the profession of monasticism was far better than Baptism, and that the monastic life was more meritorious than that of magistrates, than the life of pastors, and such like, who serve their calling in accordance with God's commands, without any man-made services. None of these things can be denied; for they appear in their own books. [Moreover, a person who has been thus ensnared and has entered a monastery learns little of Christ.]