Now, what does it all mean? Simply this, I think: that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit. We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough Chinaman, 'merely beautiful.' I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary instincts will rise with a brief for the West. But the truth is that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and does this through the one, that through the other. When I read _Hamlet,_ I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that ever lived. When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang. I forget the Voice that cried 'Sleep no more!' and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid: she seems to me to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike detachment and wonder as this: "The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since; but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle. He and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never grow weary of gazing"; --the 'lonely cloud' being, of course, Li Po himself. He has shown me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him. The mountains can speak for themselves. He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the Hills of T'ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr. Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in _feng_ and _ya,_--by which we may understand, for present purposes, much what Matthew Arnold meant by 'criticism of life.' But does it not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten: that we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we have lost? Li Po died a child at sixty: a magical child: always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts, especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay for our naughtiness,--exile from the wonder-world, and submersion in these intolerable personalities. You read Milton, and are cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the Spirit beating through. You read Li Po-type of hundreds of others his compatriots--and you are also cleaned of your personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried up out of it into the diamond ether. It seems to me that both affirmed the Divine Spirit. Milton waged grand warfare in his affirmation. Li Po merely said what he saw.