Perhaps the legend of Tanabata, as it was understood by those old
poets, can make but a faint appeal to Western minds. Nevertheless,
in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon,
the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the
scintillant sky,--to make me forget the monstrous facts of science,
and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky
Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are
powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanogawa itself,--the
River Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists
that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the
winds of autumn. White Orihimé I see at her starry loom, and the Ox
that grazes on the farther shore;--and I know that the falling dew is
the spray from the Herdsman's oar. And the heaven seems very near and
warm and human; and the silence about me is filled with the dream of
a love unchanging, immortal,--forever yearning and forever young, and
forever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the gods.




GOBLIN POETRY


Recently, while groping about an old book shop, I found a collection
of Goblin Poetry in three volumes, containing many pictures of
goblins. The title of the collection is _Ky[=o]ka Hyaku-Monogatari_,
or "The Mad Poetry of the _Hyaku-Monogatari_." The _Hyaku-Monogatari_,
or "Hundred Tales," is a famous book of ghost stories. On the subject
of each of the stories, poems were composed at different times
by various persons,--poems of the sort called _Ky[=o]ka_, or Mad