Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/156

 he joined. Jargon as his poetry upon the "Cultivation of the Pure Essence" may sound to us to-day, it represented to the scholars of his time a distinct and fashionable phase—or craze—of philosophy and speculation, to the pursuit of which many eminent and pure men devoted their entire lives, and which exercised a profound influence upon more than one Emperor of China.