Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/345

 flowers shall scatter, and a whirl of wind bear them away."

Again, the opening verses of Teou-ngo-youen, recited by the lady Tsaï, remind us of those in which so many poets, from Homer to Menander, from Theocritus to Lamartine, have expressed the contrast of Nature's ever-lasting life with man's individual decay and death—a contrast in which the origin of the pastoral elegy of Bion and Moschus, imitated by English poets, from Milton in his Lycidas to Matthew Arnold in his Thyrsis, is to be truly found. The Chinese verses run thus: "We watch the flowers spring ever forth afresh—but man grows young again like them no more. What need to hasten after wealth and rank? Rest and rejoicing are the immortals' lot." The central scene of this play offers a peculiar evidence of the close relations conceived by Chinese mind to exist between human justice and the physical forces of Nature, Teou-ngo, condemned to death by a corrupt judge, is about to be executed on the stage; she forewarns the court of the prodigies which are to prove her innocence, and which remind us of the fire that fell on the prophet's sacrifice, and the three years' drought that came on Israel. "My lord, we still are in that season of the year when painfully men bear excessive heat. 'Tis well! If I be innocent, then shall the heaven let fall, when I shall cease to live, thick flakes of chilling snow to cover o'er the body of Teou-ngo. … Know you why, of old, three years was blessed rain kept from the earth? Because the district of Tong-haï had incurred the just revenge of a woman filled with filial piety. Now it is the turn of your district of Chan