when the cold begins, and go you say the winter comes; but as for me I say it is the spring; if it were otherwise, how could these pear-blossoms be tumbling leaf by leaf? How could the willow-blossoms fly in whirls? The blossoms of the pear-tree crowd together and make a silvered ground; the blossoms of the willow lift themselves skywards like to a waving dress and fall again to earth."[1]
Beside this highly imaginative description of the falling snow, we may place the character of the deceitful courtesan drawn in Ho-lang-tan, or the "Singing Girl," a play detailing the ruin of a Chinese family by a courtesan, and excellently illustrating that inculcation of family virtues to which we shall presently advert as one of the striking characteristics of the Chinese drama. "You love," says the matron Lieou-chi to her husband, who has determined to make a second wife of Tchang-iu-ngo the courtesan, "you love those looks in which the streams of autumn seem to play;[2] you worship those eyebrows painted and delicately arched. But know you not that you ruin your character? Bethink you that this forehead, wearing the splendour of the Fou-yong flower, brings ruin upon households; that this mouth, with its carnation-hues of peach and cherry, devours the souls of men. Her perfumed breath exhales the odours of the clove tree; but much I fear that all her
- ↑ The second act of the same play contains some lines which remind us of Pope's famous simile, so much admired by Johnson, ending—
"Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise."
Tchang-i, in pursuit of his son, sings, "My outlook darkens more and more. The river here is deep, the mountain-heights vanish among the clouds; e'en so, among my grievous sorrows, I am checked by watery wastes and by that limited horizon which robs me of all view."
- ↑ The lustre of beautiful eyes is compared by Chinese novelists to "the pure waters of a fountain in autumn, over which there floats a willow-leaf."
