invariably receive you laughing, with red eyes or moist cheeks. At first
you may think him hysterical. Press him for explanation and you will get
a few broken commonplaces--"Human life has sorrow;" "They who meet must
part;" "He that is born must die;" "It is foolish to count the years of
a child that is gone, but a woman's heart will indulge in follies;" and
the like. So the noble words of a noble Hohenzollern--"Lerne zu leiden
ohne Klagen"--had found many responsive minds among us, long before they
were uttered.

Indeed, the Japanese have recourse to risibility whenever the frailties
of human nature are put to severest test. I think we possess a better
reason than Democritus himself for our Abderian tendency; for laughter
with us oftenest veils an effort to regain balance of temper, when
disturbed by any untoward circumstance. It is a counterpoise of sorrow
or rage.

The suppression of feelings being thus steadily insisted upon, they find
their safety-valve in poetical aphorism. A poet of the tenth century
writes, "In Japan and China as well, humanity, when moved by sorrow,
tells its bitter grief in verse." A mother who tries to console her
broken heart by fancying her departed child absent on his wonted chase
after the dragon-fly, hums,

"How far to-day in chase, I wonder,
Has gone my hunter of the dragon-fly!"

I refrain from quoting other examples, for I know I could do only scant
justice to the pearly gems of our literature, were I to render into a
foreign tongue the thoughts which were wrung drop by drop from bleeding
hearts and threaded into beads of rarest value. I hope I have in a