What element from the Divine is in it, does not concern itself with this earth-life; tells you nothing in criticism of life.  There is naught in it of the Soul as Thinker, nor of the Soul as Warrior.  But surely it is something for us, immersed here in these turbid Rajasika regions, to be reminded sometimes that the Sattvic planes exist; it is something for us to be given glimpses of the pure quietudes of the Spirit in its own place.  I am the better, if I have been shown for an instant the delicate imperishable beauty of the Eternal.

     “We are tired who follow after
          Truth, a phantasy that flies;
      You with only look and laughter
          Stain our hearts with richest dyes.”—­

They do indeed; with look and laughter—­or it may be tears.

Now, what does it all mean?  Simply this, I think:  that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit.  We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method.  We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough Chinaman, ‘merely beautiful.’

I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary instincts will rise with a brief for the West.  But the truth is that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and does this through the one, that through the other.  When I read Hamlet, I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that ever lived.  When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang.  I forget the Voice that cried ‘Sleep no more!’ and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid:  she seems to me to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike detachment and wonder as this: 

“The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since; but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle.  He and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never grow weary of gazing”;

—­the ‘lonely cloud’ being, of course, Li Po himself.  He has shown me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him.  The mountains can speak for themselves.

He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the Hills of T’ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a beautiful dream while the world endures.  Po Chu-i, says Mr. Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in feng and ya,—­by which we may understand, for present purposes, much what Matthew Arnold meant by ‘criticism of life.’  But does it not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten:  that we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we