"V.—It does not make for itself any nest to live in. This proves its frugality, thrift, economy."
We might compare this with the beautiful address of Anacreon to the cicada, written twenty-four hundred years ago: on more than one point the Greek poet and the Chinese sage are in perfect accord:—
"We deem thee happy, O Cicada, because, having drunk, like a king, only a little dew, thou dost chirrup on the tops of trees. For all things whatsoever that thou seest in the fields are thine, and whatsoever the seasons bring forth. Yet art thou the friend of the tillers of the land,—from no one harmfully taking aught. By mortals thou art held in honor as the pleasant harbinger of summer; and the Muses love thee. Phœbus himself loves thee, and has given thee a shrill song. And old age does not consume thee. O thou gifted one,—earth-born, song-loving, free from pain, having flesh without blood,—thou art nearly equal to the Gods! "[27]
[27] ] In this and other citations from the Greek anthology, I have depended upon Burges' translation.
And we must certainly go back to the old Greek literature in order to find a poetry comparable to that of the Japanese on the subject of musical insects. Perhaps of Greek verses on the cricket, the most beautiful are the lines of Meleager: "O cricket, the soother of slumber ... weaving the thread of a voice that causes love to wander away!" ... There are Japanese poems scarcely less delicate in sentiment on the chirruping of night-crickets; and Meleager's promise to reward the little singer with gifts of fresh leek, and with "drops of dew cut up small," sounds strangely Japanese. Then the poem attributed to Anyté, about the little girl Myro making a tomb for her pet cicada and cricket, and weeping because Hades, "hard to be persuaded," had taken her playthings away, represents an experience familiar to Japanese child-life. I suppose that little Myro—(how freshly her tears still glisten, after seven and twenty centuries!)—prepared that "common tomb" for her pets much as the little maid of Nippon would do to-day, putting a small stone on top to serve for a monument. But the wiser Japanese Myro would repeat over the grave a certain Buddhist prayer.
It is especially in their poems upon the cicada that we find the old Greeks confessing their love of insect-melody: witness the lines in the Anthology about the tettix caught in a spider's snare, and "making lament in the thin fetters" until freed by the poet;—and the verses by Leonidas of Tarentum picturing the "unpaid minstrel to wayfaring men" as "sitting upon lofty trees, warmed with the great heat of summer, sipping the dew that is like woman's milk;"—and the dainty fragment of Meleager, beginning: "Thou vocal tettix, drunk with drops of dew, sitting with thy serrated limbs upon the tops of petals, thou givest out the melody of the lyre from thy dusky skin." ... Or take the charming address of Evenus to a nightingale:—
"Thou Attic maiden, honey-fed, hast chirping seized a chirping cicada, and bearest it to thy unfledged young,—thou, a twitterer, the twitterer,—thou, the winged, the well-winged,—thou, a stranger, the stranger,—thou, a summer-child, the summer-child! Wilt thou not quickly cast it from thee? For it is not right, it is not just, that those engaged in song should perish by the mouths of those engaged in song."
On the other hand, we find Japanese poets much more inclined to praise the voices of night-crickets than those of sémi. There are countless poems about sémi, but very few which commend their singing. Of course the sémi are very different from the cicadæ known to the Greeks. Some varieties are truly musical; but the majority are astonishingly noisy,—so noisy that their stridulation is considered one of the great afflictions of summer. Therefore it were vain to seek among the myriads of Japanese verses on sémi for anything comparable to the lines of Evenus above quoted; indeed, the only Japanese poem that I could find on the subject of a cicada caught by a bird, was the following:—
Ana kanashi!
Tobi ni toraruru
Sémi no koë.
—Ransetsu.