Today's Stichomancy for Karl Rove

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac:

betrayed her ignorance to those who knew better. As the date of that marriage made it impossible to abstract one little year from her age without the knowledge of Time, she had taken it into her head to be immaculate. She scarcely seemed to belong to earth; she shook out her wide sleeves as if they had been wings. Her eyes fled to heaven at too warm a glance, or word, or thought.

There is a madonna painted by Piola, the great Genoese painter, who bade fair to bring out a second edition of Raphael till his career was cut short by jealousy and murder; his madonna, however, you may dimly discern through a pane of glass in a little street in Genoa.

A more chaste-eyed madonna than Piola's does not exist but compared

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry:

and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they

are wisest. They are the magi.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.

The Gift of the Magi

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from their player what passed for play with those sombre little urchins -- and spoke gravely one to another "Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud

The Scarlet Letter

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 Economist by Xenophon:

Perhaps you have no skill, Ischomachus, to make black white or falsehood truth (said I).[30]

[30] Or, "It may well be, Ischomachus, you cannot manufacture falsehood into truth." Lit. "Like enough you cannot make an untruth true."

XII

But (I continued presently), perhaps I am preventing you from going, as you long have wished to do, Ischomachus?

To which he: By no means, Socrates. I should not think of going away until the gathering in the market is dispersed.[1]

[1] Lit. "until the market is quite broken up," i.e. after mid-day.