Almost as poetical as the Greek “anarithma gelasma” (unnumbered laughings) is this Corean description of the sea—“Ten thousand flashings of blue waves.” [[319]]
“To lose both at a time,” is a proverb founded on a native love-story.
“When a raven flies from a pear-tree, a pear falls”—appearances are deceitful, don’t hazard a guess.
“If one lifts a stone, the face reddens.” The Coreans are fond of rival feats of lifting. Heavy stones are kept for that purpose. “Results are proportionate to effort put forth.”
Mosquitoes are lively and jubilantly hungry in Chō-sen, yet it does not do to fight them with heavy weapons or “seize a sabre to kill a mosquito.”
A very poor man is thus described: “He eats only nine times in a month,” or “He eats only three times in ten days.” To say he is in the depths of poverty is to mention the pathetic fact that “he has extinguished his fire;” for “he looks to the four winds and finds no friend.”
“The right and left are different,” is said of a hypocrite who does not speak as he thinks.
When a man is not very bright he “has mist before his eyes;” or he “carries his wits under his arms;” or has “hidden his soul under his arm-pits,” or he “goes to the east and goes to the west when he is bothered.”
Like Beaconsfield’s dictum—“Critics are men who have failed in literature and art,” is this Corean echo, “Good critic, bad worker.”
“On entering a village to know its usages,” is our “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”