Today's Stichomancy for Ronald Reagan

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso:

But gentle Raymond in his aged breast, Who had mature advice, and counsel old, Than whom in all the camp were none or few Of greater might, before Godfredo drew,

LXII And gravely said, "Ah, let it not betide, On one man's hand to venture all his host! No private soldier thou, thou are our guide, If thou miscarry, all our hope were lost, By thee must Babel fell, and all her pride; Of our true faith thou art the prop and post,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton:

"See here, Charity--you're always telling me I've got no rights over you. There might be two ways of looking at that--but I ain't going to argue it. All I know is I raised you as good as I could, and meant fairly by you always except once, for a bad half-hour. There's no justice in weighing that half-hour against the rest, and you know it. If you hadn't, you wouldn't have gone on living under my roof. Seems to me the fact of your doing that gives me some sort of a right; the right to try and keep you out of trouble. I'm not asking you to consider any other."

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson:

occupations prevented him putting his own hand to the spade, he drew up a yearly programme for his gardener, in which all details were regulated. He had begun by this time to write. His paper on Darwin, which had the merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of 'FECUNDITY, FERTILITY, STERILITY, AND ALLIED TOPICS,' which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review borrowed

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 Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon:

between dissimilar religious beliefs. The clericals when in power could not therefore show themselves more tolerant towards freethinkers than these latter are to-day toward the clericals.

These divisions, determined by differences of belief, were complicated by the addition of the political conceptions derived from those beliefs.

Many simple souls have for long believed that the real history of France began with the year I. of the Republic. This rudimentary conception is at last dying out. Even the most rigid revolutionaries renounce it,[10] and are quite willing to recognise that the past was something better than an epoch of