effusions described in a preceding chapter, and during this period produced a body of verse of an excellence which has never since been surpassed. The reader who expects to find this poetry of a nation just emerging from the barbaric stage of culture characterised by rude, untutored vigour, will be surprised to learn that, on the contrary, it is distinguished by polish rather than power. It is delicate in sentiment and refined in language, and displays exquisite skill of phrase with a careful adherence to certain canons of composition of its own.
The poetry of this and the following period was written by and for a very small section of the Japanese nation. The authors, many of them women, were either members of the Mikado's court, or officials temporarily stationed in the provinces, but looking to the capital as their home. We hear nothing of any popular poetry. On the other hand, the faculty of writing verse was universal among the higher classes. Nearly every educated man and woman could indite a Tanka upon occasion. There were no voluminous writers. It was not the custom to publish the poems of individual authors separately. Had it been so, very thin volumes indeed would have been the result. Collections were made at intervals by Imperial authority, in which the choice poems of the preceding period were brought together, and if twenty or thirty Tanka of one poet found a place there, it was sufficient to give him or her a distinguished position among the multitude of contributors.
The poetry of the Nara period has been preserved to us in one of these anthologies, known as the Manyōshiu, or "Collection of One Thousand Leaves." According to the usual account, it was completed early in the ninth century. The poems contained in it belong chiefly to
