But to-morrow does not always fulfil the promises of to-day, in China more than anywhere else. Sometimes the much wished-for day has been too long deferred. Witness in this sense a quatrain by Ho Chih-chang:

The Exile's Return

Bowed down with age I seek my native place;
Unchanged my speech, my hair is silvered now;
My very children do not know my face,

But smiling ask, O stranger, whence art thou?

Even a moderate absence from home, especially at points beyond the reach of the postal system, gives cause for much anxiety to the returning wanderer. The following lines, by Li Pin, refer to military life:

No letters to the frontier come
The winter softens into spring

I tremble as I draw near home,

And dare not ask what news you bring.

These four-line stanzas, consisting either of five or seven words to each line, are great favourites with Chinese poets. The amount that can be got out of one-perhaps read into it—is truly astonishing. Chinese poems are never very long. At the public examinations of the present day the limit is twelve lines of five words to eachanother instance of the practical character of the Chinese people. If a man cannot say all he has to say worth hearing in twelve lines, he is no longer wanted as a poet in China. The old masters were allowed more license in their own day, but the license was always sparingly used.

To return. The separation of husband and wife is a theme which has not been neglected by Chinese poets. Hsü Kan wrote:

Since my lord left-ah me, unhappy day!—
My mirror's dust has not been brushed away;
My heart, like running water, knows no peace,
But bleeds and bleeds forever without cease.

Chang Chiu-ling tried to improve on the above, as follows:

Since my lord left-ah me, unhappy hour!—
The half-spun web hangs idle in my bower;
My heart is like the full moon, full of pains,
Save that 'tis always full, and never wanes.

The husband is often away at the wars; wars, for the most part, with the accursed Turkic tribes of the North. He is made to play

Ulysses, as above, to his wife's Penelope. The question always is, when will he get home again? Sometimes we have a picture of him in camp. Han Yü writes:

Across the steppes the bitter north winds roam;
At dawn the Tartar moon shines cold and bright;
My soul relapses into dreams of home,

Till the loud rappel summons to the fight.

Here is another camp picture by Wang Han:

'Tis night: the grape-juice mantles high
in brimming cups galore;
We set to drink ;-but now the bugle
sounds to horse once more.

Oh marvel not if drunken we

lie strewed about the plain;

How few of all who seek the fight

will e'er come back again!

The following, by Kai Chia-yün, is from a wife to her husband at the wars:

Drive the young orioles away,

Nor let them through the branches play

Their chirping breaks my slumber through,

And keeps me from my dreams of you.

Hsieh Fang-tê gives us a glimpse of quite another state of things in lines which might be headed thus:

At his Club

Long past midnight the wife hears the goatsucker's cry,

And rises to see that the silkworms are fed . .

Alas! there's the moon shining low in the sky,

But her husband has not yet come back to her bed.

Love-songs are rare in Chinese poetry, in consequence of the separation of the sexes and the partial seclusion of women. Immoral poetry is still rarer. Just as the Confucian Canon is absolutely free from impure word or thought of any kind, so in the same sense is the great bulk of Chinese poetry equally without reproach. The following, by Wei Ying-wu, which would do well enough for a valentine, is only from a friend to a friend :

In autumn, when the nights are chill,
I stroll, and croon, and think of thee:
When dropping pine-cones strew the hill,
Say, hast thou waking dreams of me?

Friendship is of course a very favourite theme. Chao Chia writes:

Alone I mount to the kiosque which stands

on the river-bank, and sigh,

While the moonbeams dance on the tops of the waves

where the waters touch the sky.

For the lovely scene is to last year's scene
as like as like can be ;-

All but the friends, the much-loved friends,
who gazed at the moon with me.

The ladies of the harem, however, come in for a fair share of the poet's attention. China has more than once had its destinies swayed by an Imperial favourite, whose rise and fall have suggested verses in various trains of thought. The following lines are put by the poet Huang Fu-chi into the mouth of a dethroned beauty who evidently does not think that her day is fairly past:

See! fair girls are flocking through corridors bright,
With music and mirth borne along on the breeze .
Come, tell me, has she who is favoured to-night
Got eyebrows much longer than these?

The vanity of human wishes is recognised in China as elsewhere. Here are some verses by an anonymous poet on this well-worn subject:

Riches and rank,—a morning dream in spring;

Fame, but an unsubstantial cloud above;

Thy very body is not thine for aye;

Hate is the end of Love.

Fix not a golden collar on thy neck;

Be not with chain of jade in service bound;

Pure heart and few desires: earth's dust shake off-
And happiness is found!

Dozens of Chinese poems have been written in praise of the hermit's life. A mountain hut, with the usual clear stream, &c., retirement from the dusty world, and sweet commune with Nature— these are the only real terrestrial joys, whatever there may be to come. In the following lines the poet Ch'ên Po tells the tale of his own disillusionment:

The last word reminds me how fond Chinese poets have always been of singing the ever-recurring changes of the seasons. Spring is the favourite season. 'Half an hour of a Spring night,' says the proverb, 'is worth a hundred ounces of gold.' In this connection we may take the following lines by Tu Fu:

A petal falls !—the Spring begins to fail,
And my heart saddens with the growing gale.
Come, then, ere spoils of Spring bestrew the ground,
Do not forget to pass the wine-cup round. . . .
Kingfishers build where man once laughed elate,
And marble dragons guard his graveyard gate!
Who follows pleasure, he alone is wise;
Why waste our life in deeds of high emprise ?

Another poet, Yeh Chi, writes:

Shadows of pairing sparrows cross his book;
Of poplar catkins, dropping overhead.
The weary student, from his window-nook,

Looks up to find that Spring is long since dead.

'The weary student' means something more with the Chinese than it does with us. We bethink ourselves, perhaps, of the young man cramming for some 'exam.' with a wet towel round his head and a cup of coffee by his side. With the Chinese there is no limit of age, so that often middle-aged and sometimes old men are seen struggling for honours they have coveted for years but have never been able to obtain. For such a one, it is a serious matter to find that another Spring has slipped by.

The following poem, by Huang T'ing-chien, refers to the annual Spring festival of sacrifice at the ancestral tombs, when even the humblest individual does his best to sweep the space before the family grave, and to make offerings of meat, wine, and paper money, to the spirits of the deceased:

The peach and plum trees smile with flowers
this famous day of Spring,

While country graveyards round about
with lamentations ring.

Thunder has startled insect life,

and roused the gnats and bees;
A gentle rain has urged the crops,
and soothed the flowers and trees.
Perhaps on this side lie the bones

of a wretch whom no one knows;
On that, the sacred ashes

of a patriot repose.

But who, across the centuries,

can hope to mark each spot Where fool and hero, joined in death, beneath the brambles rot?

The same theme is thus treated by Kao Chü-mên .

The northern and the southern hills

are one large burying-ground,

And all is life and bustle there

when the sacred day comes round.

Burnt paper cash, like butterflies,
fly fluttering far and wide,

While mourners' robes with tears of blood

a crimson hue are dyed.

The sun sets, and the red fox crouches

down beside the tomb;

Night comes, and youths and maidens laugh,
while lamps light up the gloom.

Let him whose fortune brings him wine

get tipsy while he may;

For no man, when the long night comes,

can take one drop away!

Yang Chü-yüan thus distinguishes between Spring and Summer :

Chu Shu-chên has the following stanza on 'Summer':

What time the bamboo casts a deeper shade;
When birds fill up the afternoon with song;

When catkins vanish, and when pear-blooms fade,—

Then man is weary, and the day is long.

Just as Spring is written up by Chinese poets as the season of life and growth, so is Autumn usually written down as the season of decay and death. The poet Ch'êng Ching, however, who composed the accompanying verses, did not allow sentiment to get the better of his philosophy:

I wander north, I wander south,
I rest me where I please.
See how the river-banks are nipped
Beneath the Autumn breeze!
Yet what care I if Autumn blasts
The river-banks lay bare?

The loss of hue to river-banks

Is the river-banks' affair.

The love of the Chinese for flowers and gardens is well known. Their poetry abounds with floral images, allusions, descriptions, and conceits of all kinds. The following lines are by Yeh Shih: