Out from the nest of night.
The morning glory’s velvet eye
Brims with a jewelled bead.
To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly,
The world a swaying reed!
“To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly,”—a wingéd incarnation of liberty and joy; “the world a swaying reed,”—a pliant thing made for my delight, an empery of which I am the sovereign and may have my will.
But these Japanese songs have not wholly the lighter melody; there are those that sing of the devastation of the rice-fields after the floods, a grim and tragic picture; and there are interpretations of the dreams of the great bronze Buddha, looking with sad, inscrutable eyes upon the pilgrims who, with the recurrent seasons, come creeping to his feet like insects from the mould; and there is a story of “The Path of Prayer,”—a Japanese superstition so human that one is glad of a religion where sentiment overtops reason. It pictures one
walking at evening under gnarled old pines until he chances upon a hidden path leading through a hundred gates that keep a sacred way; and as he passes he is amazed to see along the route, springing as if from the earth, fluttering white papers, tied