miliar: Arabian fancy in the Thousand and One Nights; Persian lyric in the Rubaiyat; Indian thought in the Upanishads and in Buddha; Japanese painting.
But with respect to the whole, these importations are but the slightest of promises. And they have been limited to a few hundred specialists and a few thousand lovers of poetic, pictorial, and metaphysical curiosities.
The work of the future must be two-fold; to select the best from the entire mass, and to bring that best to universal knowledge. There are marvels of poetry to be found, prodigies of painting and of sculpture, triumphs of invention, depths of wisdom. There is enough in the East to change our opinions as to the very nature of the most essential realities, and to double the keyboard of our sentiments.
II
In this coming Renaissance a major part will fall to China, which now lies prostrate. We are better acquainted with the Arabs, who are nearer neighbors, and with the Indians, through a sense of philological affinity, and because India is a European possession.
China, far greater, but more distant, more enclosed, more heterogeneous, and more timid,
