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Call to the merry hall our grandsons too,

And teach them how to read their che and woo;*
Upon the chess-board strive to win the day,
And never lose your temper in your play.
Time's snows are on my head-and youth is gone,
And spite of thought, disease and death come on;
Why should I fly from what I cannot shun?†

I see thee in a distance-cherish'd one !

With hair dishevel'd-while men shout the name

Of this man's honor and of that man's fame.

While I and mine‡ are wandering! Grief! be still'd;
Go! till the garden; cultivate the field;

Yet may I join thy rustic toils, content

time of Woo Te, of Leang, who on his return from a warlike expe. dition went to court and found the Emperor and his friends amusing themselves with the bouts rimés. "He cannot make poetry," said they, and the Emperor would not allow him to join the game. On his entreaty not to be excluded, the only remaining rhyme was handed to him; it was King and Ping, meaning “quarrelsome and "sick." But Sun King-tsun improvised this quatrain:

I went-my family grieved; I came,
And the pipes and the drums are rolicking;
And I ask the passengers now I'm home-
Am I not like the famous Ho Kheu-ping?

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Ho Kheu-ping was an illustrious general who subdued the Heung noo, and Sun King-tsun was not deemed the less happy, in that the concluding ping was only in sound, but not in character, the same with that handed over to his sagacity.

*Read Che and Woo. It is said that Pih Lo-teen, a poet contemporary with Le Tai-pih, learnt the two characters when only a few months old; they had been pointed out by his nurse.

†The line is Byron's, the thought is Lin's.

Orig. "I and my son."

With a hind's wages*—'neath a rustic tent,

So that with thee life's short remains be spent.

He thus celebrates the extent of the Chinese Empire:

Old Teen-hwang now is but a weedy waste,†

But Yang-kwan's‡ gate has ancient Tsew replaced.
A dyke was once Han's boundary,§ now th' expanse,
Fill'd then by wild fowl, owns Yaou's heavenly glance.
And the celestial influence spreading wide,||

Absorbs new sovereignties on every side.

Majestic prowess rolling towards the west,

Gives to the farthest regions peace and rest.

*This has reference to an eminent literary character under the How Han dynasty. In his poverty he and his wife supported themselves by obtaining the wages of laborers for pounding rice.

† An ancient encampment of the outer barbarians beyond the extreme western point of the Great Wall.

Yang Kwan is another name for the Kea-yü pass, and the gate replacing the ancient Tsew Tseuen represents the progress of the Chinese power.

§ A dyke formerly separated the territories of Han and Tsoo; it passed through the modern province of Ho-nan (at Yung-yang Heen) communicating with the Yellow river at Yung-tsih.

Orig. "The majesty of the throne has spread far since the exposure of Urh-foo"-a foreign tribe headed by Wei Wei, who murdered a chief of a neighboring tribe.

A RECENT VISIT TO THE CLASSIC GROUNDS OF CHINA.

After an introduction, such as the foregoing pages afford, to the ancient sages and emperors, and all the worthies who figured in Chinese history and song as rulers, teachers, or authors, the reader will begin to feel a desire to learn more respecting the present condition of the country in which they lived. Were it possible, he would make a pilgrimage to the places of their birth, and the scenes among which they lived and acted. He would visit their tombs, and study the inscriptions on their Monuments.

.

The roads leading to those sites, made memorable in Grecian and Roman history, are always alive with enthusiastic tourists.

Scarcely a class in any college, but at one time or another has had its representatives in the lands of Homer and Virgil, longing to see with their own eyes every spot which has been immortalized by the historian's and by the poet's pen: yearly, for ages past, have fresh throngs of pilgrims appeared around the pyramids, and gone searching through the temple-ruins of Egypt: Palestine, with all its sacred associations, is still fresh ground to each

successive tourist: in later years Babylon and Nineveh are rewarding the search of the antiquarian: while China until lately, has kept itself shut in, and other portions of the world shut out. Recently, however, the walls were scaled, and foreign scholars are now not only penetrating all the fields of her literature, but they are visiting the places where were enacted the scenes of four thousand years ago. They find the monuments which for thousands of years have withstood the ravages of time: they study and translate their inscriptions.

It is with peculiar pleasure that we are able to lay before the reader, ere he shall close this volume, the outlines of a picture of the classic grounds of China.

What we here present is compiled from the notes of a journey which was recently made through the regions which were traveled over by the renowned Yu, when engaged in redeeming the country from the desolations caused by the inundation; regions over which Confucius traveled on foot or rode in his chariot of primitive pattern; regions which are rich in monuments of a more hoary antiquity than any other land can boast.

That those monuments with their inscriptions are preserved perfect down through so many generations, will cause less surprise when it is known that many of them are within the temples, sheltered from the action of storms and sun. Another reason for their preservation is found in the permanent character of the population : the families do not move about from place to place, but as the old disappear, children succeed them, perpetuating the name and the occupation of the fathers from generation to generation. Should there be civil wars, still the tombs, ancient tablets, and monumental struc

tures are sacred, and no harm is allowed to come to them.

The quotations given below are from the "Notes of a journey from Pekin to Chefoo, via the Grand Canal, Yen-Chow-Foo, etc., by Rev. A. Williamson."

See Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; New Series, No. III, 1866.

The Journal says:

On the 18th October, 1865, I set off from Peking in company with a native teacher: at Tung-chow-foo we obtained a boat to take us on to Lin-tsing-chow, the spot where the Grand Canal divides into two branches-the main branch leading to Hang-chow-foo and the river Yang-tze, the other, called the Wei-ho, to Ho-nan and the west. Two days took us to Tien-tsin, and our journey may be said to have begun.

Traveling along this portion of the Canal we found it ́in excellent repair, from eighty to one hundred feet wide, and from eight to ten feet deep. The towns along the banks were less flourishing than I had anticipated, many being little better than heaps of ruins; the only towns of real importance on the way to Lin-tsing being Tsau-chow and Yüh-chow, spelt Yi-chow in the Admiralty maps; the former incloses a large space of ground, but there does not appear to be extensive business carried on.

Arriving at Lin-tsing we found it to be an extensive market for all kinds of goods; the city had been burned down by the Taiping rebels several years ago, and had not been rebuilt. Here the Canal branches off in two directions, one to Ho-nan and south-westward, and the other, and formerly the principal one, proceeding south, to Soo-chow and Hang-chow. Here the famous locks

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