breathing in, a kind of hiatus:  thus Ts’in meant one country, and Tsin another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well.  That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case.  Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is.  Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it.  You pronounce shih one tone—­you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means poetry; you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes a corpse:—­as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress on you it really does.—­Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed.  But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on.  We have solid words that you can spell:  articles built up with the bricks of sound-stuff we call letters:  c-a-t cat, d-o-g dog, and so on;—­but their words, no; nothing so tangible:  all depends on little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,—­and above all, musical tones. Now then, which is the more primitive?  Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the spiritual, pole?

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* Encyclopaedia Britannica: article, China:  Language.
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More primitive—­I do not know.  Only I think when the Stars of Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy; when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight, quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

     “They prayed, but their worship was only
          The wonder of nights and of days,”

—­when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the poems of the earth was made:—­it was song, it was tone, it was music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language:  seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps:  and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the Glory of God.  And then—­was it like this?—­they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their