Today's Stichomancy for Richard Wilhelm

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland:

case of "Old Mother Hubbard" as will readily be seen by examining the meter of the various verses. The original "Mother Hubbard" consisted of nothing more than the first six lines which contain three rhymes. All the other verses have but four lines and one rhyme. We find the same thing in Chinese Mother Goose. Take the following as an example: He ate too much, That second brother,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde:

thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.'

On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot:

appropriate to phrases and poems written in foreign languages. For a version of this poetry volume which uses a basic character set without diacritical marks, please see Project Gutenberg files named TSEPM10.TXT and TSEPM10.ZIP.]

POEMS

by T. S. ELIOT

New York Alfred A. Knopf 1920

To Jean Verdenal 1889-1915

Certain of these poems first appeared in Poetry, Blast, Others, The Little Review, and Art and Letters.

CONTENTS

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 End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad:

ting a strident and cruel uproar, the sound of the fa- miliar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath, of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a flaw.

But when the Sofala happened to close with the land after sunset she would find everything very still there under the mantle of the night. All would be still, dumb, almost invisible--but for the blotting out of the low constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses of the islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst the dark spaces of the heaven: and the ship's three lights,

End of the Tether