have one of them myself,"
was the answer, "and the rest of the world the other." Ts'ao
Chih enriched the language with one of its most familiar and
delicious quotations:

"The Superior Man takes precautions,
And avoids giving rise to suspicion:
He does not pull up his shoes in a melon patch,
Nor adjust his cap while passing through an orchard of plums."

It is indicative of his own position at court.

Later in the third century came the Seven Sages of the Bamboo
Grove, a "club of rather bibulous singers"; and there are names
of many scholars besides to say that the time was not too barren;
yet on the whole it was, I suppose, a period of slump in literary
production, as it was of confusion in politics. But when Julian
had been dead two years in the west of the world, Tao Yuan-ming
was born in the east: I do not say the creator of a new time;
but certainly a sign of its coming.

A large amount of his poetry survives; and it is filled with a
new spirit. Like Wordsworth, he went back to nature. Ambition,
of course, had been a great mark of the age: men raced after
office, and scrambled for the spoils. Tao Yuan-ming was called
to fill an official post, and went up reluctantly to the
capital; but very soon escaped back to the things he loved:
the mountains, and his chrysanthemum garden, and the country,
where he could hear the dogs barking in the far farms, and see
the chickens scratching in the lanes. We do not find in him,
perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of
the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a
heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky:
he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength,
which is Nature-worship. While he pottered about in the front
garden, he tells us, his wife pottered about in the back garden;
they made an idol of their chrysanthemums, and started or
nourished the cult which has flourished so strongly since in
Japan. He was I suppose the greatest poet since Ch'u Yuan, who
came some seven centuries earlier; it is from him we get the story
some of you may know under the title _Red Peach-Blossom Inlet._

For about half a cycle (sixty-five years) barbarian dynasties had
been holding the north; with the result that the center of
gravity of the real Black-haired People had been shifted from the
puritan landscapes of North China to the pagan landscapes of the
Yangtse Valley,--a region of