to my mind.’ All this, together with a poem in which she compared her grandchild to a flower which has lost the tree that sheltered it from the great winds, was so wild and so ill-writ as only to be suffered from the hand of one whose sorrow was as yet unhealed.
Again the Emperor strove for self-possession in the presence of his messenger. But as he pictured to himself the time when the dead lady first came to him, a thousand memories pressed thick about him, and recollection linked to recollection carried him onward, till he shuddered to think how utterly unmarked, unheeded all these hours and days had fled.
At last he said ‘I too thought much and with delight how with most profit might be fulfilled the wish that her father the Councillor left behind him; but of that no more. If the young Prince lives occasion may yet be found… It is for his long life that we must pray.’
He looked at the presents she had brought back and ‘Would that like the wizard you had brought a kingfisher-hairpin as token of your visit to the place where her spirit dwells’ he cried, and recited the poem: Oh for a master of magic who might go and seek her, and by a message teach me where her spirit dwells.
For the picture of Kuei-fei, skilful though the painter might be, was but the work of a brush, and had no living fragrance. And though the poet tells us that Kuei-fei’s grace was as that of ‘the hibiscus of the Royal Lake or the willows of the Wei-yang Palace,’ the lady in the picture was all paint and powder and had a simpering Chinesified air.
But when he thought of the lost lady’s voice and form, he could find neither in the beauty of flowers nor in the song of birds any fit comparison. Continually he pined that fate should not have allowed them to fulfil the vow which morning and evening was ever talked of between
