night it is certainly futile to dwell on it. Although the author never tells when he heard the bell, I would understand it to be the bell of very early Summer morning, when the whole world and life are in perfect silence; if you awake at such an hour, your bodily composure making your ears doubly susceptible to any sound, I am sure your mind will become at once cooler with the sound of a bell which, with the finest feeling, leaves the wooden bell-hammer, and bids good-bye. And take still one more poem by the same author in the following:
“Haru no voya
Yoi akebono no
Sono Nakani.”
(“The night of the Spring,–
Oh, between the eve
And the dawn.”)
The old Chinese poets sang on the Spring eve, prizing it above many thousand pounds in gold, while the Japanese Uta poets of ancient days admired the purple-coloured dawn of Spring; in the opening passages of Sei Shonagon’s Makura Zoshi or Pillow Sketches we have the following: “In Spring,” to use Aston’s translation, “I love to watch the dawn grow gradually white and whiter, till a faint rosy tinge crowns the mountain’s crest, while slender streaks of purple cloud extend themselves above.” Such is the
