In Spring, &quot;for sheer delight,&quot; sang Yuan Mei, &quot;I set the lanterns swinging through the trees.&quot;<br />This was no formal Feast of Lanterns held in the first month of the year, but his own private affair, the lonely ritual of a spring-worshipper and garden anchorite.<br />Perhaps those who loved him&mdash;and they were many&mdash;wandered his pleached alleys and maple groves and admired the lanterns with their red dragons that leaped and plunged in gold and silver seas; but I like to think that the guests were gone in long procession of gleaming boats when the old rose-master looked on his garden and found it whiter and fairer than the far-off moon. At once you guess the whole charm and weakness of Chinese poetry. Here is the narrow moon-garden of its range, its myriad dragons shoaling through unreal seas, its peonies with the souls of mandarins and chrysanthemums with the shadows of children.<br />Yet this sense of limitation and unreality belongs only to the surface; within this little space lies a vast world opened to us through symbols.