Yokoi Yayū, a Japanese poet of the eighteenth century, celebrated as a composer of hokku, has left us this naïve record of the feelings with which he heard the chirruping of cicadæ in summer and in autumn:—
"In the sultry period, feeling oppressed by the greatness of the heat, I made this verse:—
"Sémi atsushi
Matsu kirabaya to
Omou-madé.
[The chirruping of the sémi aggravates the heat until I wish to cut down the pine-tree on which it sings.]
"But the days passed quickly; and later, when I heard the crying of the sémi grow fainter and fainter in the time of the autumn winds, I began to feel compassion for them, and I made this second verse:—
"Shini-nokoré
Hitotsu bakari wa
Aki no sémi."
[Now there survives
But a single one
Of the sémi of autumn!]
Lovers of Pierre Loti (the world's greatest prose-writer) may remember in Madame Chrysanthème a delightful passage about a Japanese house,—describing the old dry woodwork as impregnated with sonority by the shrilling crickets of a hundred summers.[30] There is a Japanese poem containing a fancy not altogether dissimilar:—
[30] ] Speaking of his own attempt to make a drawing of the interior, he observes: "Il manque à ce logis dessiné son air frêle et sa sonorité de violon sec. Dans les traits de crayon qui représentent les boiseries, il n'y a pas la précision minutieuse avec laquelle elles sont ouvragées, ni leur antiquité extrême, ni leur propreté parfaite, ni les vibrations de cigales qu' elles semblent avoir emmagasinées pendant des centaines d'étés dans leurs fibres desséchées."