hat runs before his
door. Windows of course he has none.
He cannot see his vegetable garden, and his toilet pots,
and the dirty canal.
But he is quite safe!

Wusih

The Most-Sacred Mountain

Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow
six thousand steps of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy.

Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their
slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the void.

Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity--a swift, white peace,
a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This
is the end that has no end.

Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
into timelessness.
The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
says: _On this spot once Confucius stood and
felt the smallness of the world below._

The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.

But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
white peace, this stinging exultation;
And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the
rhythm of the daily round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and
always I shall feel time ravel thin about me;
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.

Tai Shan

The Dandy

He swaggers in green silk and his two coats are lined
with fur. Above his velvet shoes his trim, bound
ankles twinkle pleasantly.
His nails are of the longest.
Quite the glass of fashion is Mr. Chu!
In one slim hand--the ultimate punctilio--dangles
a bamboo cage, wherein a small brown bird sits
with a face of perpetual surprise.
Mr. Chu smiles the benevolent smile of one who satisfies
both fashion and a tender heart.
Does not a bird need an airing?

Wusih

New China: The Iron Works

The furnaces, the great steel furnaces, tremble and
glow; gigantic machinery clanks, and in living
iridescent streams the white-hot slag pours out.
This is to-morrow set in yesterday, the west imbedded
in the east, a graft but not a growth.

And you who walk beside me, picking your familiar way
between the dynamos, the c