a remarkable poetical literature
with the same quality:--and that before the rest of Europe
had, for the most part, awakened to the spiritual impulses
that lead to civilization. In the seventh and eighth centuries,
when continental Europe was in the dead vast and middle of
pralaya, Chinese poetry, under Tang Hsuan-tsong and his great
predecessors, was in its Golden Age--a Golden Age comparable to
that of Pericles in Athens. In the seventh and eighth centuries,
Ireland was sending out scholars and thinkers as missionaries to
all parts of benighted Europe: Ireland in her golden age, the
one highly cultured country in Christendom, was producing a
glorious prose and poetry in the many universities that starred
that then by no means distressful island. In 420, China, after a
couple of centuries of anarchy, began to re-establish her
civilization on the banks of the Yangtse. In 410, the Britons
finally threw off the Roman yoke, and the first age of Welsh
poetry, the epoch of Arthur and Taliesin, which has been the
light of romantic Europe ever since, began.

Does it not seem as if that great Far Eastern note could not
be struck without this little far western note vibrating in
sympathy? Very faintly; not in a manner to be heard clearly by
the world; because in historical times the Celtic note has been
as it were far up on the keyboard, and never directly under the
Master-Musician's fingers. And when you add to it all that this
Celtic note has come in the minds of literary critics rather to
stand as the synonym for Natural Magic--you all know what is
meant by that term;--and that now, as we are discovering the old
Chinese poetry and painting, we are finding that Natural Magic is
really far more Chinese than Celtic--that where we Celts have
vibrated to it minorly, the great Chinese gave it out fully and
grandly--does it not add to the piquancy of the 'coincidence?'

Now there is no particular reason for doubting the figures of
Chinese chronology as far back as 2350 B.C. Our Western
authorities do doubt all before about 750; but it is hard to see
why, except that 'it is their nature to.' The Chinese give the
year 2356 as the date of the accession of the Emperor Yao, first
of the three canonized rulers who have been the patriarchs,
saints, sages, and examples for all ages since. In that decade a
manvantara of the race would seem to have begun, which lasted
through the dynasties of Hia and Shang, and halfway through