and finally, early in the 19th Century, to one Solomon Juneau, a Frenchman, at the new trading post of Milwaukee on the Menominee River and the shore of Lake Michigan.
Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home—where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking.
So for generations did the sainted skull of Caius Anicus Magnus Furius Camillus Æmilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus, consul of Rome, favorite of emperors, and saint of the Romish church, lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town. At first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a deity sent from the upper world, it afterward fell into dire neglect as the race of simple, artless burrowers succumbed before the onslaught of the conquering Aryan. Sewers came, but they passed it by. Houses went up—2,303 of them, and more—and at last one fateful night a titan thing occurred. Subtle nature, convulsed with a spiritual ecstasy, like the froth of that region’s quondam beverage, laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble—and behold! In the roseal dawn the burghers of Milwaukee rose to find a former prairie turned to a highland! Vast and far-reaching was the great upheaval. Subterrene arcana, hidden for years, came at last to the light. For there, full in the rifted roadway lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly, and consular pomp the dome-like skull of Ibid!
———0———
Japanese Hokku
There is something very great in Far Eastern esthetics which the Western World misses almost completely—a feeling born of a truly rational philosophy which recognizes the insignificance of mankind. The genuine un-Westernized Chinese or Japanese poet—or artist—sees the supreme beauty in large rhythms of nature, and in momentary perceptions of natural objects, or arrangements of things, which symbolizes those rhythms. In all this, mankind and its emotions are necessarily subordinated in just proportion to the whole scheme of cosmic entity—or visible cosmic entity. The Oriental does not slop over—hence his classic disapproval of effusive amatory lyrics.
Some of the most fascinating Japanese hokkus (17-syllable poems) are to be found in the essay “Butterflies,” by Lafcadio Hearn, in his volume called Kwerdan. Speaking of the prominence of the butterfly in Japanese art and lore, Hearn assembles a number of hokkus on the subject—presenting both the Japanese sounds in Roman letters and a literal prose translation of the meaning. Of course to us the beauty comes mainly from the translation; but we can also catch from the original sounds something of the grace and music of the language and poetic form. I append some which appeal most strongly to me:
Rakkwa éda ni
Kaeru to miréba
Kocho kana!
(When I saw the fallen flower return to the branch—lo, it was only a butterfly!)
Chiru—hana ni—
Karusa arasoü
Kocho kana!
(How the butterfly strives to compete in lightness with the falling flowers!)
Taurigané ni
Tomorité nemuru
Kocho kana!
(Perched upon the temple bell, the butterfly sleeps.)
Chö tondé—
Kazé naki hi to mo
Miezari ki!
(Even though it did not seem a windy day, the fluttering of the butterflies…).
—Extract from a Lovecraft Letter, 1936.
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