Such an experience first gave me the idea of making a collection of songs containing Buddhist expressions or allusions. But in view of the extent of the subject I could not at once decide where to begin. A bewildering variety of Japanese songs--a variety of which the mere nomenclature would occupy pages--offers material of this description. Among noteworthy kinds may be mentioned the Utai, dramatic songs, mostly composed by high priests, of which probably no ten lines are without some allusion to Buddhism;--the Naga-uta, songs often of extraordinary length;--and the Joruri, whole romances in verse, with which professional singers can delight their audiences for five or six hours at a time. The mere dimension of such compositions

necessarily excluded them from my plan; but there remained a legion of briefer forms to choose among. I resolved at last to limit my undertaking mainly to dodoitsu,--little songs of twenty-six syllables only, arranged in four lines (7, 7, 7, 5). They are more regular in construction than the street-songs treated of in a former paper; but they are essentially popular, and therefore more widely representative of Buddhist influences than many superior kinds of composition could be. Out of a very large number collected for me, I have selected between forty and fifty as typical of the class.

Perhaps those pieces which reflect the ideas of preexistence and of future rebirths will prove especially interesting to the Western reader,--much less because of poetical worth than because of comparative novelty. We have very little English verse of any class containing fancies of this kind; but they swarm in Japanese poetry oven as commonplaces and conventionalisms. Such an exquisite thing as Rossetti's "Sudden Light,"--bewitching us chiefly through the penetrative subtlety of a

thought anathematized by all our orthodoxies for eighteen hundred years,--could interest a Japanese only as the exceptional rendering, by an Occidental, of fancies and feelings familiar to the most ignorant peasant. Certainly no one will be able to find in these Japanese verses--or, rather, in my own wretchedly prosy translations of them--even a hint of anything like the ghostly delicacy of Rossetti's imagining:--

I have been here before,--
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet, keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights along the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.

Yet what a queer living difference between such enigmatically delicate handling of thoughts classed as forbidden fruit in the Western Eden of Dreams and the every-day Japanese utterances that spring directly out of ancient Eastern faith!--