imagination into all sorts of opal glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;—­and by and by the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to Japan, and brought to pass there all sorts of nice Japanese cherry-blossomy and plum-blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido-ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:—­reawakened, in fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.

It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether.  It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning, an undiluted Theosophy.  The lower the stratum of thought into which it fell, the less it could be Thought-Spiritual, the stuff unalloyed of Manas-Taijasi.  Nevertheless, it was the Pearl Immortality, with a vigor and virtue of its own, and a competence for ages, on whatever plane it might be, to work wonders.  Among thinking and spiritual minds it remained a true Way of Salvation.  Among the masses it came to be thought of presently as personal immortality and the elixir of life.  Regrettable, you may say; but this is the point:  nothing was ever intended to last forever.  You must judge Taoism by what it was in its day, not by what it may be now.  Laotse had somehow flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity:  had confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great Mystery, the Divine Silence.  It is simply a fact that that is the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow and bloom.  Search for the Secret in chatter and outward sights and deeds, and you soon run to waste and nothingness; but seek here, and you shall find what seemed a void, teeming with lovely forms.  He set the Chinese imagination, staggered and stupefied by the so long ages of manvantara, and then of ruin, into a glow of activity, of grace, of wonder; men became aware of the vast world of the Within; as if a thousand Americas had been discovered.  It supplied the seed of creation for all the poets and artists to come.  It made a new folklore; revivified the inner atmosphere of mountains and forests; set the fairies dancing; raised Yellow Crane Pagodas to mark the spot where Wang Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight.  It sent out the ships of Ts’in Shi Hwangti presently to seek the Golden Islands of Peng-lai, where the Immortals give cups of the elixir to their votaries; in some degree it sent the armies of Han Wuti in search of the Garden of Si Wang Mu.  The ships found (perhaps) only the Golden Islands of Japan; the armies found certainly Persia, India, and even the borders of Rome;—­and withal, new currents, awakening and inter-national, to flow into China and make splendid the Golden Age of Han.

X.  “SUCH A ONE”

“I produce myself among creatures, O son of Bharata, whenever there is a decline of Virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world:  and thus I incarnate from age to age for the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and the establishment of righteousness.”—­Bhagavad-Gita