d himself in an obscure place. He
had an artificial branch made by some goldsmith; but, of course, this
deception was at once detected.]

[Footnote 129: Japanese pictures usually have explanatory notes
written on them.]

[Footnote 130: It seems that this stanza alludes to some incident in
the Shio-Sammi, at the same time praising the picture.]

[Footnote 131: This seems to be the name of the hero in the story
alluded to above.]

* * * * *

CLASSICAL POETRY OF JAPAN

[_Selections translated by Basil Hall Chamberlain_]

INTRODUCTION

The poetry of a nation is always the best revealer of its genuine
life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual
outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for
imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence.
Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is
never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even
though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted
the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose
words seem naturally to bourgeon into assonant terminations. But
Japanese poetry is original in every sense of the term. Imitative as
the Japanese are, and borrowers from other nations in every department
of plastic, fictile, and pictorial art, as well as in religion,
politics, and manufactures, the poetry of Japan is a true-born flower
of the soil, unique in its mechanical structure, spontaneous and
unaffected in its sentiment and subject.

The present collection of Japanese poetry is compiled and translated
into English from what the Japanese call "The Collection of Myriad
Leaves," and from a number of other anthologies made by imperial
decree year by year from the tenth until the fifteenth century. This
was the golden age of Japanese literature, and nowadays, when poetry
is dead in Japan, and the people and their rulers are aiming at
nothing but the benefits of material civilization, these ancient
anthologies are drawn upon for vamping up and compiling what pass for
the current verses of the hour. The twenty volumes of the "Myriad
Leaves" were probably published first in the latter half of the eighth
century, in the reign of the Mikado Shiyaumu; the editor was Prince
Moroye, for in those days the cultivation of verse was especially
considered the privilege of the princely and aristocratic. A poem
written b