poets.

As for the forty-odd _tanka_ which I have translated, their chief
attraction lies, I think, in what they reveal to us of the human
nature of their authors. Tanabata-tsumé still represents for us the
Japanese wife, worshipfully loving;--Hikoboshi appears to us with none
of the luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband of the
sixth or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention had begun
to exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also these poems
interest us by their expression of the early feeling for natural
beauty. In them we find the scenery and the seasons of Japan
transported to the Blue Plain of High Heaven;--the Celestial Stream
with its rapids and shallows, its sudden risings and clamourings
within its stony bed, and its water-grasses bending in the autumn
wind, might well be the Kamogawa;--and the mists that haunt its shores
are the very mists of Arashiyama. The boat of Hikoboshi, impelled
by a single oar working upon a wooden peg, is not yet obsolete; and
at many a country ferry you may still see the _hiki-funé_ in which
Tanabata-tsumé prayed her husband to cross in a night of storm,--a
flat broad barge pulled over the river by cables. And maids and wives
still sit at their doors in country villages, on pleasant autumn days,
to weave as Tanabata-tsumé wove for the sake of her lord and lover.

* * * * *

--It will be observed that, in most of these verses, it is not the
wife who dutifully crosses the Celestial River to meet her husband,
but the husband who rows over the stream to meet the wife; and there
is no reference to the Bridge of Birds.... As for my renderings, those
readers who know by experience the difficulty of translating Japanese