But Heaven has providentially decreed that these evil
    spirits can travel only in a straight line.  Around
    a corner their power evaporates. 
So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
    door.  Windows of course he has none. 
He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
    and the dirty canal. 
But he is quite safe!

  Wusih

The Most-Sacred Mountain

Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
    six thousand steps of climbing! 
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.

Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
    of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
    floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity. 
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
    slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.

Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity—­a swift, white peace,
    a presence manifest. 
The rhythm ceases here.  Time has no place.  This
    is the end that has no end.

Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
    before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
    into timelessness. 
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
    says:  On this spot once Confucius stood and
    felt the smallness of the world below.

The stone grows old. 
Eternity
Is not for stones.

But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
    white peace, this stinging exultation;
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the
    rhythm of the daily round. 
Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
    always I shall feel time ravel thin about me;
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.

  Tai Shan

The Dandy

He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined
    with fur.  Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound
    ankles twinkle pleasantly. 
His nails are of the longest. 
Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu! 
In one slim hand—­the ultimate punctilio—­dangles
    a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits
    with a face of perpetual surprise. 
Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
    both fashion and a tender heart. 
Does not a bird need an airing?

  Wusih

New China:  The Iron Works

The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
    glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
    iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out. 
This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
    in the east, a graft but not a growth.