Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/112

 100 CHINESE LITERATURE

Their oarsmen keep time to the piping and drumming. . . . Yet joy is as naught Alloyed by the thought That youth slips away and that old age is coming."

The next lines were written upon the death of a harem favourite, to whom he was fondly attached :

" The sound of rustling silk is stilled, With dust the marble courtyard filled; No footfalls echo on the floor, Fallen leaves in heap: block up the door. . . . For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost, And 1 am left, in hopeless anguish tossed?

A good many anonymous poems have come down to us from the first century B.C., and some of these contain here and there quaint and pleasing conceits, as, for instance

" Man reaches scarce a hundred, yet his tears Would fill a lifetime of a thousand years?

The following is a poem of this period, the author of which is unknown :

" Forth from the eastern gate my steeds I drive, And lo ! a cemetery meets my view; Aspens around in wild luxuriance thrive, The road is fringed with fir and pine and yew. Beneath my feet lie the forgotten dead, Wrapped in a twilight of eternal gloom ; Down by the Yellow Springs their earthy bed, And everlasting silence is their doom. How fast the lights and shadows come and go / Like morning dew our fleeting life has passed; Man, a poor traveller on earth below, Is gone, while brass and stone can still outlast.

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