Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/418



Here we have a purely Korean picture - a youth on his way to attend the national examination, his life before him. He has stopped to rest on the slope of one of the grand mountains of Korea, and he thinks of all that must have trodden that same path to honours and success; and as he gazes up at the rock-ribbed giant, the spirit of poetry seizes him and he demands of the mountain who these successful ones may be. Between the second and third verses we imagine him fallen asleep and the mountain telling him in his dreams the long story of those worthy ones. As the youth awakes and resumes his journey, he looks up and asks that his name may be added to that list. In what more delicate or subtle way could he ask the genius of the mountain to follow him and bring him success?

There is another song that may be placed in that much maligned category of " Spring poems," whose deprecation nets the comic papers such a handsome sum.

The Korean is your true lover of springtime. The harshness of his winter is mitigated by no glowing hearth or cosey chimney-corner. Winter means to him a dungeon, twelve by eight, dark, dirty, poisonous. Spring means to him emancipation, breathing space, pure pleasure,—animal pleasure, if you will,—but the touch of spring affects him to the finger-tips and makes his senses " stir with poetry as leaves with summer wind." He is simply irrepressible. He must have song.