Accustomed to regard the East as the land of imagination; reading in our childhood the wild romances of Arabia; passing, in the poetry of Persia, into an atmosphere of tender and entrancing song; then, as we go farther East into India, encountering the vast epics of the Maha-Bharata and the Ramayana;--we might naturally expect to find in far Cathay a still wilder flight of the Asiatic Muse.

Not at all.

We drop at once from unbridled romance into the most colorless prose.

Another race comes to us, which seems to have no affinity with Asia, as we have been accustomed to think of Asia.

No more aspiration, no flights of fancy, but the worship of order, decency, propriety, and peaceful commonplaces.