England were spent by him on a visit to a friend, an old Wykehamist, whose people lived in a river-side house near Richmond. Saleh was quite contented to remain where he was, and had he been left to himself he would have declined the invitation unreservedly. Mr. Le Mesurier, however, thought that it would be good for him to be severed for a time from the support of his "home" surroundings, and to be thus forced to stand alone. He therefore insisted upon an acceptance being sent, and in due course Saleh reluctantly followed his letter.

Harry Fairfax, the friend in question, had become very intimate with the Le Mesuriers, and had learned to look upon Saleh as a member of the family. Also he liked him for himself, and thought that it would be rather a "lark" to introduce the little stranger to his own people. His father and mother were quiet

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elderly pair, still wholly wrapped up in one another, who watched the bewildering doings of their offspring with a mild surprise without attempting to influence or control them. If Harry had expressed his intention of inviting Muck-a-Muck, the noble savage himself, to stay at Crosslands, Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax would have supposed that such was the fashion of the present day, and would have raised no objection. Their daughters, Alice and Sibyl, who were also allowed to do in all things very much as they pleased, thought that their brother's proposal promised some amusement, and they were prepared to pay almost any price for the rare privilege of his company at home. Therefore the prospect of Saleh's visit displeased nobody except Saleh himself.

Just at first he was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that Fairfax's relations-more especially the two girlseyed him with a certain curiosity, as a being new to their inexperience. Living under the same roof in daily inter

course with women, between whom and himself there subsisted no such brother and sister familiarity as that to which life with the Le Mesuriers had accustomed him, brought with it a measure of embarrassment. It made him shy, self-conscious, constrained,-all things from which hitherto his simplicity had kept him singularly free,-and yet in some way it was pleasurable, stimulating, even exciting. These latter sensations were realized more fully later, when the first strangeness of his new environment had to some extent worn off; but at the beginning of his visit Saleh felt himself to be divided from the Fairfaxes by an impalpable barrier. Its nature and cause he did not attempt to analyze, only he was dimly aware of its existence, and an unwonted feeling of loneliness; of isolation, came upon him. Instinct told him, hinted to him, that he was regarded as in some sort an alien, a curiosity, and this made him sore and angry, not with others, but with himself. It was as though he had suddenly been revealed to himself in a new light,-had been made conscious of some unsuspected, unreal, yet inherent inferiority in his nature which differentiated him from the rest of humanity. He would rather have died than have shaped such a thought in words; for the moment he shirked allowing it to take even nebulous form in the back of his mind-in his most secret self-communings; but none the less an uneasy restlessness was bred in him by these disquieting, vague, and, as he forced himself to believe, groundless suspicions. For some days, therefore, he shunned the companionship of his new friends, seeking refuge from them and from the shadowy fancies that troubled him in solitary rambles. These led him mostly into Richmond Park, for the big expanse of comparatively wild woodland held for him a curious fascination. Though he had almost ceased to remember it, Saleh

was forest-bred, and he, to whom by right of birth belongs the freedom of the jungle, is driven by instinct to the woods and thickets when the craving for consolation is upon him. The old park, with its network of metalled roads, its tame deer and fearless rabbits nibbling the grass undisturbed by groups of Londoners picnicking noisily within a few yards of them, was but a poor substitute for the magnificent, untouched forests of Malaya. Even here, however, there were hollow places filled with tangles of underwood or mounds of brambles, sheltered by which it was possible for Saleh to fancy himself very far removed from the hurrying life around him; and here, too, the huge gnarled trunks of oak and elm were silent comrades whose neighborhood consoled him with a sense of companionship and peace.

It was in Richmond Park that Saleh first saw the little Princess-a figure more exotic than his own-clad in a crimson frock, with a coquettish feather springing saucily from a toque of the same brilliant color. She passed quite close to him where he lay among the bracken, a dog-whip in her little hand, and five great hounds of a breed unknown to Saleh, with long coats of white and silver-gray, lean, fierce heads, sharp muzzles, and savage eyes. The girl's hair was black, as only the hair of an Asiatic woman can be; her clear pale skin was swarthy; her features-the straight, low forehead, the hooked nose with nostrils curving outward, the full lips, the rounded but slightly retreating chinwere strongly Semitic in cast; her eyes -the big, sloe-black, elliptical eyes of Northern India-were veiled and dreamy in repose under the heavy arches of eyebrow. She was of smaller stature than are most European girls, and her trim figure had ever so little a tendency to thickness; but her hands and feet were exquisite things, diminu

tive in size and most delicately formed, although at the bases of her almondshaped finger-nails tiny smudges of a faint dusky blue betrayed the Eastern blood. She looked at the youngster lounging on the grass and passed him by with a toss of her little head.

After that Saleh saw her frequently, always clad in crimson or scarlet,-for the love of colors crude and gay was innate in her, always chaperoned by those five great hounds, over whom she seemed to exercise a tyrannical ascendancy. The incongruity of this oriental child and her surroundings began by piquing Saleh's curiosity, though it was significant of the extent to which he had identified himself with the people of his adoption that the little Princess, who, as a fellow-Asiatic, and one of his own color, should surely have been felt to be akin to him, seemed to him a being outlandish, fantastic, bizarre,-infinitely more alien than were any of the English girls with whom he was wont to associate. Her beauty-for the little Jewish-looking lady with her marvellous eyes, the heavy arched eyebrows, and the wealth of blue-black hair, had her full share of good looks-made no appeal to him, even repelled him a little, just as the pink-and-white loveliness of English women had repelled him five years earlier. His taste had altered with the rest of him, and to-day he was as insular in the narrow range of his appreciation as any British-born youngster in the set to which he belonged. He had no desire to make the little Princess's acquaintance, for the sight of her was, in a manner, terrifying to him. It seemed to cross the t's, to dot the i's of his half-formed fears, to make his vague suspicions more haunting and less nebulous, to add to the restless uneasiness of which he was already the prey. Somehow or another that crudely tinted exotic figure, moving so incongruously across the quiet English

landscape, conveyed to him a hint that emphasized the falseness of the position which he himself occupied, and forced upon him an explanation of all that had troubled him since he came to stay with the Fairfaxes-the true explanation to which he still strove to shut his eyes. It was as though he Blackwood's Magazine.

had caught sight of himself horribly caricatured and distorted in a misshapen mirror, and instinctively he turned his head away, refusing to look at an ugly vision which was fraught for him with so much of pain and of humiliation.

The book, if you can get it, is worth reading, not only for its curiosity, but for its beauty and its charm. It was published ten years since, and one would be tempted to say that the poetry in it is the best that this generation has known, save that the greater part of it has been written for the last ten centuries. Yet, though it contains so much that is excellent and old, one might travel far without meeting a single reader who had ever heard of the poets of this anthology. Have they, then, been lately rediscovered, dug up, perhaps, from a buried city, and so, after the lapse of ages, restored to the admiration that is their due? By no means! These poems have been printed in innumerable editions, and the names of their writers are familiar words in the mouths of millions. Here are contradictions enough to perplex the most expert of Hegelians, but they are contradictions which, like those of Hegel, may be synthesized quite comfortably, if only you know the trick. The book is a collection of verse translations by Professor Giles, of Cambridge; and the translations are from the Chinese.

It is a faint and curious tone which reaches us, re-echoed so sympathetically by Professor Giles's gracious art, from those far-off, unfamiliar voices of singers long since dead. The strange vibrations are fitful as summer breezes,

and fragmentary as the music of birds. We hear them, and we are ravished; we hear them not, and we are ravished still. But, as in the most fluctuating sounds of birds or breezes, we can perceive a unity in their enchantment, and, listening to them, we should guess these songs to be the work of a single mind, pursuing through a hundred subtle modulations the perfection which this earth has never known. We should err; for through the long centuries of Chinese civilization, poet after poet has been content to follow closely in the footsteps of his predecessors, to handle the very themes which they had handled, to fit the old music to the old imaginations, to gather none but beloved and familiar flowers. In their sight a thousand years seem indeed to have been a moment; the song of the eighteenth century takes up the burden of the eighth; so that, in this peculiar literature, antiquity itself has become endowed with everlasting youth. The lyrics in our anthology, so similar, so faultless, so compact of art, remind one of some collection of Greek statues, where the masters of many generations have multiplied in their eternal marbles the unaltering loveliness of the athlete. The spirit is the classical spirit

that in which the beauties of originality and daring and surprise are made an easy sacrifice upon the altar of perfection; but the classicism

of China affords, in more than one respect, a curious contrast to that of Greece. The most obvious difference, no doubt, is the difference in definition. Greek art is, in every sense of the word, the most finished in the world; it is for ever seeking to express what it has to express completely and finally; and, when it has accomplished that, it is content. Thus the most exquisite of the lyrics in the Greek Anthology are, fundamentally, epigrams— though they are, of course, epigrams transfigured by passion and the highest splendors of art. One reads them, and one is filled, in a glorified and ethereal manner, with the same kind of satisfaction as that produced by a delicious mouthful of wine. One has had a draught of hippicrene, a taste of the consummation of beauty, and then one turns over the page, and pours out another glass. Different, indeed, is the effect of the Chinese lyric. It is the very converse of the epigram; it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, must be merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings. It hints at wonders; and the revelation which at last it gives us is never a complete one-it is clothed in the indefinability of our subtlest thoughts.

A fair girl draws the blind aside

And sadly sits with drooping head; I see the burning tear-drops glide,

But know not why those tears are shed.

"The words stop," say the Chinese, "but the sense goes on." The blind is drawn aside for a moment, and we catch a glimpse of a vision which starts us off on a mysterious voyage down the widening river of imagination. Many of these poems partake of the nature of the "chose vue"; but they are not photographic records of isolated facts, they are delicate pastel drawings of some intimately seized experienee. Whatever sights they show us-a girl

gathering flowers while a dragon-fly perches on her comb-a lonely poet singing to his lute in the moonlightpink cheeks among pink peach blossoms; whatever sounds they make us hear the nightjar crying through the darkness-the flute and the swish of the swing among summer trees-all these things are presented to us charged with beautiful suggestions and that kind of ulterior significance which, in our moments of imaginative fervor, the most ordinary Occurrences possess. Here, for instance, is a description of a sleepless night-a description made up of nothing but a short list of simple facts, and yet so full of the very mystery of one of those half-vague, halfvivid watchings that we feel ourselves the friends of the eleventh-century poet who wrote the lines

The incense-stick is burnt to ash, the water-clock is stilled,

The midnight breeze blows sharply by and all around is chilled. Yet I am kept from slumber by the beauty of the spring: Sweet shapes of flowers across the blind the quivering moonbeams fling!

Sometimes the impression is more particular, as in this charming verseShadows of pairing swallows cross his book,

Of poplar catkins, dropping overhead...

The weary student from his windownook

Looks up to see that spring is long

since dead.

And sometimes it is more general

The evening sun slants o'er the village

street;

My griefs, alas! in solitude are borne; Along the road no wayfarers I meet.Naught but the autumn breeze across

the corn.

Here is the essence of loneliness distilled into four simple lines; they were written, in our eighth century, by Kêng Wei.

Between these evanescent poems and the lyrics of Europe there is the same kind of relation as that between a scent and a taste. Our slightest songs are solid flesh-and-blood things compared with the hinting verses of the Chinese poets, which yet possess, like odors, for all their intangibility, the strange compelling powers of suggested reminiscence and romance. Whatever their subject, they remain ethereal. There is much drunkenness in them, much praise of the wine-cup and the "liquid amber" of the "Lan-ling wine"; but what a contrast between their tipsiest lyrics and the debauched exaltation of Anacreon, or the boisterous jovialities of our Western drinking-songs! The Chinese poet is drunk with the drunkenness of a bee that has sipped too much nectar, and goes vaguely among the flowers. floats off at once through a world of delicate and airy dreams—

skimming His mind

Oh, the joy of youth spent in a goldfretted hall,

In the Crape-flower Pavilion, the fairest of all,

My tresses for head-dress with gay garlands girt,

Carnations arranged o'er my jacket and shirt!

Then to wander away in the softscented air,

And return by the side of his Majesty's chair. . . .

So wrote the drunken Li Po one summer evening in the imperial garden eleven hundred years ago, on a pink silk screen held up before him by two

ladies of the court. This great poet

died as he had lived--in a trance of exquisite inebriation. Alone in a pleasure-boat after a night of revelry, he passed the time, as he glided down the river, in writing a poem on himself, his shadow, and the moon

The moon sheds her rays on my goblet

and me,

And my shadow betrays we're a party of three...

See the moon-how she glances response to my song;

See my shadow-it dances so lightly along!

While sober I feel, you are both my good friends;

When drunken I reel, our companionship ends.

But we'll soon have a greeting without a good-bye,

At our next merry meeting away in the sky.

He had written so far, when he caught sight of the reflection of the moon in the water, and leant over the side of the boat to embrace it. He was drowned; but the poem came safely to shore in the empty boat; it was his epitaph.

Besides their lightness of touch and their magic of suggestion, these lyrics possess another quality which is no less obvious-a recurrent and pervading melancholy. Even their praise of

wine is apt to be touched with sadness; it is praise of the power that brings release and forgetfulness, the subtle power which, in one small goblet, can drown a thousand cares. Their melancholy, so delicate and yet so profound, seems almost to be an essential condition of an art which is nothing if not fragmentary, allusive, and dreamy. The gaiety which bubbles over into sudden song finds no place in this anthology. Its poets are the poets of reflection, preoccupied with patient beauties and the subtle relationships of simple things. Thus, from one point of view, they are singularly modern, and perhaps the Western writer whose manner they suggest most constantly is Verlaine. Like him, they know the art of being quiet in verse. Like him, they understand how the fluctuations of temperament may be reflected and accentuated by such outward circumstances as the weather or the time of year. In particular, like him, they are never tired of the rain. They have