You will, I dare say, have learned to look for a rise in China at any falling-time in Europe; so would consider something should have happened there in 365, the year of the great earthquake and tidal wave, when the fifty thousand Alexandrians were drowned,—­ the second year after Julian’s death.  Well; in that 365 Tao Yuan-ming was born, who later became known as Tao Chien:  in Japanese, Toemmei.  There had been poets all along.  During the last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period:  among them that jolly K’ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse.  Ts’ao Ts’ao himself wrote songs:  he was that bold bad adventurer and highly successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his brother Ts’ao Chih.  Of Ts’ao Chih a contemporary said:  “If all the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts’ao Chih would have eight of them.”—­“Who, then, would have the other two?” asked somebody.—­“I should have one of them myself,” was the answer, “and the rest of the world the other.”  Ts’ao Chih enriched the language with one of its most familiar and delicious quotations: 

     “The Superior Man takes precautions,
     And avoids giving rise to suspicion: 
     He does not pull up his shoes in a melon patch,
     Nor adjust his cap while passing through an orchard of plums.”

It is indicative of his own position at court.

Later in the third century came the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a “club of rather bibulous singers”; and there are names of many scholars besides to say that the time was not too barren; yet on the whole it was, I suppose, a period of slump in literary production, as it was of confusion in politics.  But when Julian had been dead two years in the west of the world, Tao Yuan-ming was born in the east:  I do not say the creator of a new time; but certainly a sign of its coming.

A large amount of his poetry survives; and it is filled with a new spirit.  Like Wordsworth, he went back to nature.  Ambition, of course, had been a great mark of the age:  men raced after office, and scrambled for the spoils.  Tao Yuan-ming was called to fill an official post, and went up reluctantly to the capital; but very soon escaped back to the things he loved:  the mountains, and his chrysanthemum garden, and the country, where he could hear the dogs barking in the far farms, and see the chickens scratching in the lanes.  We do not find in him, perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky:  he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength, which is Nature-worship.  While he pottered about in the front garden, he tells us, his wife pottered about in the back garden; they made an idol of their chrysanthemums, and started or nourished the cult which has flourished so strongly since in Japan.  He was I suppose the greatest poet since Ch’u Yuan, who came some seven centuries earlier; it is from him we get the story some of you may know under the title Red Peach-Blossom Inlet.