joy.  How can you flow out to the moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in your veins;—­if you are blocked with a desire, or a passion for things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike?  Beauty is Tao:  it is Tao that shines in the flowers:  the rose, the bluebell, the daffodil—­the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the peony—­they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways into the Kingdom of God.  How can you know them, how can you go in through them, how can you participate in the laughter of the planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible you, the personality?  Laotse went lighting little stars for the Black-haired People:  went pricking the opacity of heaven, that the Light of lights might filter through.  If you call him a philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really he did not bother to possess.  Rather he stood by the Wells of Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets.  There is no way to Poetry but Laotse’s Way.  You think you must go abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a hindrance:  a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder them from looking for that which you may see, as he says, ‘through your own window.’  If you traverse the whole world seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that counts, which is Here, and Now.  Seek to feed your imagination on outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps excite, but surely soon starve it.  But at the other pole, the inner “How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author of all things!” And then I hear someone ask him whence it originated—­someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose of philosophy.  What! catch Laotse?  “I know,” said Confucius, “how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim.  But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow.  But there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds and rises into heaven.”  No; you cannot hook, snare, or shoot the Dragon.  “I do not know whose son Tao is,” says Laotse.  “It might appear to have been before God.”

So I adhere to the tale of the old man in the Royal Library, holding wonderful quiet conversations there; that “it might appear to have been before God” is enough to convince me.  There was a man once*—­I forget his name, but we may call him Cho Kung for our purposes; he was of affable demeanor, and an excellent flautist; and had an enormous disbelief in ghosts, bogies, goblins, and ‘supernatural’ beings of every kind.  It seized him with the force of a narrow creed; and he went forth to missionarize, seeking disputants.  He found one in the chief Librarian of some provincial library; who confessed to a credulousness along that line, and seemed willing to talk.  Here then were grand opportunities—­for