Chapter III

Clear shines the hill; the rice-fields round
Two cranes are circling; sleepy and slow,
A blue canal, the lake’s blue bound,
Breaks at the bamboo bridge; and lo!
Touched with the sundown’s spirit and low,
I see you turn, with flirted fan,
Against the plum-tree’s bloomy snow--
I loved you once in old Japan!

_Envoy_

Dear, ’twas a dozen lives ago;
But that I was a lucky man
The Toyokuni here will show,
I loved you once in old Japan.

_William Ernest Henley._

PRE-EXISTENCE

While sauntering through the crowded street
Some half-remembered face I meet,
Albeit upon no mortal shore
That face, methinks, hath smiled before.
Lost in a gay and festal throng
I tremble at some tender song
Set to an air whose golden bars
I must have heard in other stars.
In sacred aisles I pause to share
The blessings of a priestly prayer,
When the whole scene which greets mine eyes
In some strange mode I recognize,
As one whose every mystic part
Had been prefigured in my heart.
At sunset as I calmly stand
A stranger on an alien strand,
Familiar as my childhood’s home
Seems the long stretch of wave and foam.
A ship sails toward me o’er the bay
And what she comes to do and say
I can foretell. A prescient lore
Springs from some life outlived of yore.
O swift, instructive, startling gleams
Of deep soul-knowledge; not as dreams
For aye ye vaguely dawn and die,
But oft with lightning certainty
Pierce through the dark, oblivious brain
To make old thoughts and memories plain:
Thoughts which perchance must travel back
Across the wide bewildering track
Of countless eons; memories far
High reaching as yon palled star,
Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace
Faints on the outmost rings of space.

_Paul Hamilton Hayne._

STANZAS

“_We are such stuff as dreams are made of._”