CHINESE FOLKLORE AND SOME WESTERN ANALOGIES. 589 



and other lofty buildings are of gold and jade. The birds and l)easts 

 are beautiful in form and color. The trees look like colunujs of pearl 

 The fruits have a delightful taste, and those who eat of them never 

 grrow old or die. The inhabitants are men who belong to the class of 

 the immortals and are all sages. In one day and night they fly to the 

 other isles and liack again. The five islands are quite separate at their 

 base and float on the ocean surface as the tide and waves compel them 

 in unresisting movement,"^ etc. 



Change the points of the compass and we have in this ancient chron- 

 icle a sufficient description of that group of islands across the boundless 

 ocean that occurs in every ancient literature of the West. Atlantis, 

 the Hesperides, remote Ogygia, and the Celtish Avalon, of Arthurian 

 legend, 



Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 

 Nor ever wind blows loudly; but lies 

 Deep-nieadow'd, happy, fair, with orchard lawns 

 And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea, 



are all prototypes of these far-away isles. The belief in Europe in 

 this mysterious land is prevalent in Norse, Teutonic, and Celtic, as 

 well as in Greek and Egyptian folklore, and many tales of singular 

 beauty are woven upon this theme. In each land these distant isles 

 take color from the fancies and prejudices of the people who portray 

 their imaginary delights, but like pictures of heaven — with which 

 indeed they unwittingly blend — they are much alike in feeling if not 

 in detail. It became the fashion in the twelfth century to burlesque 

 the notion. A French poem calls it cookeryland, Cocaigne, where run 

 rivers of wine and roasted geese go down the street turning themselves 

 until they are done perfectly brown; where the ladies are always fair 

 and have new clothes every month; where the fountain of perpetual 

 youth washes off weakness and age and renews the appetite and 

 enthusiasm of its favored inhabitants. The Portuguese version of the 

 old myth, as related by Washington Irving,^ shows it adapted to the 

 preferences of a Christian people. Once upon a time, this story runs, 

 an old pilot was blown ashore near Lisl)on, raving about an island far 

 beyond the Canaries upon which be had been driven and where he 

 had found a gracious company descended from certain of his country- 

 men who hacf escaped thither when Spain was conquered l)y the Mos- 

 lems. They were recognized, when he told his tale, as the liand of 

 Christian exiles who had indeed fled from the Moors under seven 

 bishops, and whose fate had hitherto remained a mystery. The ardent 

 young cavalier, Don Fernando de Alma, soon gathered a company to 

 search for the mvsterious island, and after driving about tempestuous 

 seas for many days his caravel found itself, when the sto rm lif ted,^i 



'J. Edkins: "Steps in the Growth of Early Taoism," Chin. Recorder, May, 1884. 

 ' Chronicles of Wolfert's Roost, and other Papers. 



