Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/179

 CHAPTER. XVIII.

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF COREA.

The love of the marvellous, which forms so distinguishing a characteristic of all Eastern and a few Western nations, recently led a Japanese editor to regale his readers with a vivid account of the wonders of Corea. We are no longer told of golden sarcophagi and royal tombs bursting with inexhaustible treasures. That fable seems to have died out, and in its place we are assured that Corea is a land where Nature, and not art, has played some of her strangest freaks. The Seven Wonders of the Old World were all the works of men. The Seven Wonders of Corea are natural—or, as we suppose we ought to say, supernatural. It is a beautiful and fertile land, and it would, perhaps, be strange if no myths were found to be associated with the mountains and forests and rivers which diversify its aspect. The graceful superstitions of classic Greece find but few analogues in the Far East. There is nothing in the mythology of China to compare with them in point of imagery or aesthetic beauty. The naiads and dryads which played at hide-and-seek amid the bosky dells and woodland scenery of the Peloponnesus may be said to have had a few distant relations in the mythology of Chinese fairy-tales, but the relationship was exceedingly remote. There is not wanting, however, even there, in those prosaic Eastern lands,