Today's Stichomancy for Mitt Romney

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis:

of time. They was three or four purty good stories I had been trying over in my head to tell Martha when I seen her. Any one of them stories might of done all right; but I hadn't decided WHICH one to use. And, of course, I run plumb into Martha. She was standing by the gate, which was about twenty yards from the veranda. And all four lies popped into my head at oncet, and got so mixed up with one another there, I seen right off it was useless to try to tell anything that sounded straight. Be- sides, when you are in the fix I was in, what can you

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

All those secret currents, that flow With such resistless undertow, And lift and drift, with terrible force, The will from its moorings and its course. Therefore he spake, and thus said he:-- "Like unto ships far off at sea, Outward or homeward bound, are we. Before, behind, and all around, Floats and swings the horizon's bound, Seems at its distant rim to rise And climb the crystal wall of the skies,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout:

"Hardly," I answered; and in my absorbing interest in the phenomenon before me I half forgot my pain.

I moved to the edge of one of the walls extending at right angles to the passage, but there was little to be made of it. It was of soft limestone, and most probably the portion that had disappeared was granite, carried away by the force of its own weight.

"We are like to be buried," I observed, returning to Harry and Desiree. "Though for that matter, even that can hardly frighten us now."

"For my part," said Harry, with a curious gravity beneath the

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 Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw:

who dotes without doubting; who _knows_, and who is hugely amused at the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with Yorick's skull, and inviting "my lady" to laugh at the sepulchral humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have done), to Yorick's favor she must come at last. To the Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments