h. He will get no elation from success, nor chagrin
from failure; he will not account the throne his private gain,
no look on the empire of the world as glory personal. His glory
is to know that all thigns are one, and life and death but phases
of the same existence."

Why call that about burying gold and casting pearls into the sea
one of the supreme utterances?--Well; Chwangtse has a way of
putting a whole essay into a sentence; this is a case in point.
We have discussed Natural Magic together many times; we know how
the ultimate beauty occurs when something human has flowed out
into Nature, and left its mysterious trace there, upon the
mountains, or by the river-brink,

"By paved fountain, or by rushy brook.
Or on the beached margent of the sea."

Tu Fu saw in the blues and purples of the morning-glory the
colors of the silken garments of the lost poet Ssema Hsiangju, of
a thousand years before--that is, of the silken garments of his
rich emotion and adventures. China somehow has understood this
deep connexion between man and Nature; and that it is human
thought molds the beauty and richness, or hideousness and
sterility of the world. Are the mountains noble? They store
the grandeur and aspirations of eighteen millions of years of
mankind. Are the deserts desolate and terrible? It was man made
the deserts: not with his hands, but with his thought. Man is
the fine workshop and careful laboratory wherein Nature prepares
the most wonderful of her wonders. It is an instinct for this
truth that makes Chinese poetry the marvel that it is.--So the
man of Tao is enriching the natural world: filling the hills
with gold, putting pearls in the sea.

I do not know where there is a more pregnant passage than this
following,--a better acid (of words) to corrode the desperate
metal of selfhood; listen well, for each clause is a volume.
"Can one get Tao to possess it for one's own?" asks Chwangtse;
and answers himself thus: "Your very body is not your own; how
then should Tao be?--If my body is not my own, whose is it,
pray?--It is the delegated image of God. Your posterity is not
your own; it is the delegated exuviae of God. You move, but
know not how; you are at rest, but know not why; you taste, but
know not the cause; these are the operations of universal law.
How then should you get Tao so as to possess it for your own?"

Now then, I want to take one of those clauses, and try to see
what Chwan