Today's Stichomancy for Nicky Hilton

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

And of his atoms, -- ready as another In his emergence to exonerate His father and his mother; He may have been a captain of a host, Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies, Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees, And then give up the ghost. Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these, Sun-scattered and soon lost.

Whatever the dark road he may have taken, This man who stood on high

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters:

Light cannot fill the craving eye, Nor riches half our wants supply, Pleasure but doubles future pain, And joy brings sorrow in her train;

Laughter is mad, and reckless mirth-- What does she in this weary earth? Should Wealth, or Fame, our Life employ, Death comes, our labour to destroy;

To snatch the untasted cup away, For which we toiled so many a day. What, then, remains for wretched man?

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac:

ideal, which is their religion.

After saving a few jewels from the wreck with great difficulty, Madame du Val-Noble was crushed under the burden of the horrible report: "She ruined Falleix." She was almost thirty; and though she was in the prime of her beauty, still she might be called an old woman, and all the more so because in such a crisis all a woman's rivals are against her. Mariette, Florine, Tullia would ask their friend to dinner, and gave her some help; but as they did not know the extent of her debts, they did not dare to sound the depths of that gulf. An interval of six years formed rather too long a gap in the ebb and flow of the Paris tide, between La Torpille and Madame du Val-Noble, for the woman "on

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 Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde:

Mine ancient wisdom and austere control? Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelay, Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God: Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance - And must I lose a soul's inheritance?