Today's Stichomancy for James Joyce

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

Even of five hundred courses of the sun, Show me your image in some antique book, Since mind at first in character was done! That I might see what the old world could say To this composed wonder of your frame; Wh'r we are mended, or wh'r better they, Or whether revolution be the same. O! sure I am the wits of former days, To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now. This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will, and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had

The Scarlet Letter

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

des yeux tres langoureux. Je me rappelle que je l'ai vu regardant Salome d'une facon langoureuse. En effet, j'ai trouve qu'il l'avait un peu trop regardee.

HERODIAS. Il y en a d'autres qui la regardent trop.

HERODE. Son pere etait roi. Je l'ai chasse de son royaume. Et de sa mere qui etait reine vous avez fait une esclave, Herodias. Ainsi, il etait ici comme un hote. C'etait e cause de cela que je l'avais fait capitaine. Je regrette qu'il soit mort . . . Enfin, pourquoi avez-vous laisse le cadavre ici? Il faut l'emporter ailleurs. Je ne veux pas le voir . . . Emportez-le . . . [On emporte le cadavre.] Il fait froid ici. Il y a du vent ici.

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 My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott:

before it.

The doctor led the ladies, who greatly required his support, into the apartment from whence they came, where wine, essences, and other means of restoring suspended animation, had been provided during his absence. He motioned them to chairs, which they occupied in silence--Lady Forester, in particular, wringing her hands, and casting her eyes up to heaven, but without speaking a word, as if the spell had been still before her eyes.

"And what we have seen is even now acting?" said Lady Bothwell, collecting herself with difficulty.

"That," answered Baptista Damiotti, "I cannot justly, or with