(indeed the ancient Japanese thought was that life’s greatest sin was the sin of weakness) as the old Norsemen thought; but our ancestors hailed, I believe, from a warmer climate with poetry and love; they were from the beginning poets and warriors. To return to Yamato-Take; he was a fierce type like Meredith’s King Harold; while the English ballad ends with the following lines,
“Sudden, as it were a monster oak
Split to yield a limb by stress of heat,
Strained he, staggered, broke
Doubled at their feet,”
the story of Yamato-Take does not close with his death, because, from the hatred of death and shadow, his great dead spirit turned into a white bird eight fathoms long, soared up to the skies, and flew away over the seas, while the princesses and children who had shared equal pains under his conquering banner in the Eastern countries, pursued after that bird with their sad songs in heart, saying:
“Impeded are our loins in the plain,
(The plain thick with bamboo-grasses):
Oh! we are only on foot,
Not flying through the skies.”
Again saying:
“Impeded are our loins as we go
Through the seas, oh! tottering
In the seas like herbs
Grown in a great river-bed.”
