o have spoken her
final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the
Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid: she seems to me
to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike
detachment and wonder as this:

"The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since;
but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle. He
and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never
grow weary of gazing";

--the 'lonely cloud' being, of course, Li Po himself. He has shown
me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him.
The mountains can speak for themselves.

He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the
Hills of T'ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a
beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr.
Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in _feng_ and
_ya,_--by which we may understand, for present purposes, much
what Matthew Arnold meant by 'criticism of life.' But does it
not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be
lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten: that
we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we
have lost? Li Po died a child at sixty: a magical child:
always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts,
especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay
for our naughtiness,--exile from the wonder-world, and submersion
in these intolerable personalities. You read Milton, and are
cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the
Spirit beating through. You read Li Po-type of hundreds of
others his compatriots--and you are also cleaned of your
personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried
up out of it into the diamond ether. It seems to me that both
affirmed the Divine Spirit. Milton waged grand warfare in his
affirmation. Li Po merely said what he saw.

So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in
and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among
the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream,
but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression. A great drama
or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working
in a human mind. A great lyric comes of the escape of the
consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit. The West has
produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the
view that the Spirit can have no other ex