into the world of men. Very well then; he, being one
with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary
Garden; would go, and leave--

A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of
Chinese life. You could not tell it at the time; you never would
have guessed it--but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering
in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and
tramplings, had had something--some seed of divinity, thrown down
into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three
centuries or so, and then--

There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering
the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it. You will see
that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast
away as savoring too much of the Manchu. (But it was Laotse and
Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the
Banished Angel that it savored of really.) Well, it was this Blue
Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pass to the
Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of
men;--it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment
there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the
fields of China;--and the Dragon would come to seek it in his
time.--You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his
ox. I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.

For it really was the Blue Pearl: and the Lord knew what it was
to do in China in its day. It fell down, you may say, from the
clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world;
and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of
iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and
glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pass;
and kindle the Chinese imagination into all sorts of opal
glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;--and by and by
the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to Japan, and brought to
pass there all sorts of nice Japanese cherry-blossomy and plum-
blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido-
ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:--reawakened, in
fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.

It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities
the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether.
It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among
the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning,