But when the Crest-Wave Egos were in China, that larger freedom of hers enabled her, among other things, to achieve the highest heights in art:  the Yellow Crane was at her disposal, and she failed not to mount the heavens; she had the glimpses Wordsworth pined for; she was not left forlorn.  This merely for another blow at that worst superstition of all:  Unbrotherliness, and our doctrine of Superior Racehood.—­Many of the tales are mere thaumatolatry:  as of the man who took out his bones and washed them once every thousand years; or of the man who would fill his mouth with rice-grains, let them forth as a swarm of bees to gather honey in the valley,—­then readmit them into his mouth as to a hive, where they became rice again,—­presumably “sweetened to taste.”  But in others there seems to be a core of symbolism and recognition of the fundamental things.  There was a man once,—­the tale is in Giles’s Dictionary of Chinese Biography, but I forget his name—­who sought out the Sennin Ho Kwang (his name might have been Ho Kwang); and found him at last in a gourd-flask, whither he was used to retire for the night.  In this retreat Ho Kwang invited our man to join him; and he was enabled to do so; and found it, once he had got in, a fair and spacious palace enough.  Three days he remained there learning; while fifteen years were passing in China without.  Then Ho Kwang gave him a rod, and a spell to say over it; and bade him go his ways.  He would lay the rod on the ground, stand astride of it, and speak the spell; and straight it became a dragon for him to mount and ride the heavens where he would.  Thenceforth for many years he was a kind of Guardian Spirit over China:  appearing suddenly wherever there was distress or need of help:  at dawn in mountain Chungnan by Changan town in the north; at noon, maybe, by the southern sea; at dusk he might be seen a-dragon-back above the sea-mists rolling in over Yangtse;—­and all in the same day.  But at last, they say, he forgot the spell, and found himself riding the clouds on a mere willow wand;—­and the wand behaving as though Newton had already watched that aggravating apple;—­and himself, in due course dashed to pieces on the earth below.—­There is some fine symbolism here; the makings of a good story.

And now we come to 197, “the year in which (to quote our tabulation above) the main or original Han Cycle should end,” and in which “we should expect the beginnings of a downfall.”  The Empire, as empires go, is very old now:  four hundred and forty odd years since Ts’in Shi Hwangti founded it; as old as Rome was (from Julius Caesar’s time) when the East and West split under Arcadius and Honorius; nearly three centuries older than the British Empire is now;—­the cyclic force is running out, centripetalism very nearly wasted.  In these one-nineties we find two non-entitous brothers quarreling for the throne:  who has eyes to see, now, can see that the days of Han are numbered.