tion would do him a world of good. He wrote “Tankyoku” in the Sad Love and Sad Song, the fourteen-line songs which proved successful. They are impressive in their own special way, one dwelling on a speculation in thought, and another carrying a terribly realistic picture of passion. What he sings in them is less Japanese than universal. “Tankyoku” is not a sonnet which should be rigid in form and idea; it is simply written in fourteen lines:
“Holding a stone which has no voice,
I cry my world away with tears;
’Tis not for love as the other people say,
’Tis not for the pain which I suffer most,
’Tis more than my pain and love;
My flesh of burning thoughts will burn,
And my hot tears alone run down,
When the loneliness in my bosom comes to flow.
Nor God nor Death is in me;
If there is a thing, ’tis this loneliness:
Now I am a prey of my own life,
And cry away this endless world with the stone;
It bears silence eternally growing,
And I pour on it my own tears.”
It is acknowledged that in his later work he has deserted the golden realm of romanticism and entered delightfully into the silver-grey cloud-land of symbolism; and he has made a better friendship with Verlaine, and taken him as a bosom friend without any proper etiquette, and even thinks that he is himself a Japanese Verlaine. I am sure that there is no slightest harm in it.
