Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/171

 upon the poet TS'EN TS'AN, who graduated about 750, as witness his lines on that faith :

" A shrine whose eaves in far-off cloudland hide : I mount, and with the sun stand side by side. The air is clear; I see wide forests spread And mist-crowned heights where kings of old lie dead. Scarce o'er my threshold peeps the Southern Hill; The Wei shrinks through my window to a rill. . . . O thou Pure Faith, had I but known thy scope, The Golden God 1 had long since been my hope /"

WANG CHIEN took the highest degree in 775, and rose to be Governor of a District. He managed, however, to offend one of the Imperial clansmen, in consequence of which his official career was abruptly cut short. He wrote a good deal of verse, and was on terms of inti- macy with several of the great contemporary poets. In the following lines, the metre of which is irregular, he alludes to the extraordinary case of a soldier's wife who spent all her time on a hill-top looking down the Yang- tsze, watching for her husband's return from the wars. At length

" Where her husband she sought,

By the river's long track, ' Into stone she was wrought, And can never come back ;

'Mid the wind and the rain-storm for ever and ay t She appeals to each home-comer passing tftat way"

The last line makes the stone figure, into which the unhappy woman was changed, appear to be asking of every fresh arrival news of the missing man. That is the skill of the artist, and is inseparably woven into the original.

1 Alluding to the huge gilt images of Buddha to be seen in all temples.

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