72-846, was a very prolific poet. He held several high
official posts, but found time for a considerable output of some of
the finest poetry in the language. His poems were collected by
Imperial command, and engraved upon tablets of stone. In one of them
he anticipates by eight centuries the famous ode by Malherbe, _A Du
Perrier, sur la mort de sa fille_.

The T'ang dynasty with all its glories had not long passed away before
another imperial house arose, under which poetry flourished again in
full vigour. The poets of the Sung dynasty, A.D. 960-1260, were many
and varied in style; but their work, much of it of the very highest
order, was becoming perhaps a trifle more formal and precise. Life
seemed to be taken more seriously than under the gay and
pleasure-loving T'angs. The long list of Sung poets includes such
names as Ss[)u]-ma Kuang, Ou-yang Hsiu and Wang An-shih, to be
mentioned by and by, the first two as historians and the last as
political reformer. A still more familiar name in popular estimation
is that of Su Tung-p'o, A.D. 103-1101, partly known for his romantic
career, now in court favour, now banished to the wilds, but still more
renowned as a brilliant poet and writer of fascinating essays.

The Mongols, A.D. 1260-1368, who succeeded the Sungs, and the Mings
who followed the Sungs and bring us down to the year 1644, helped
indeed, especially the Mings, to swell the volume of Chinese verse,
but without reaching the high level of the two great poetical periods
above-mentioned. Then came the present dynasty of Manchu Tatars, of
whom the same tale must be told, in spite of two highly-cultured
emperors, K'ang Hsi and Ch'ien Lung, both of them poets and one of
them author of a collection containing no fewer than 33,950 pieces,
most of which, it must be said, are but four-line stanzas, of no
literary value whatever. It may be stated in this connexion that
whereas China has never produced an epic in verse, it is not true that
all Chinese poems are quite short, running only to ten or a dozen
lines at the most. Many pieces run to several hundred lines, though
the Chinese poet does not usually affect length, one of his highest
efforts being the four-line stanza, known as the "stop-short," in
which "the words stop while the sense goes on," expanding in the mind
of the reader by the suggestive art of the poet. The "stop-short" is
the converse of