Japanese literature of the old _régime_ was written partly in classical Chinese, partly in pure Japanese, and comprised mostly mythology, history, law, poetry, romance, drama, and Buddhist and Confucian philosophy. As we cannot go into details on this subject, so tempting, we shall confine ourselves to a few comments on Japanese poetry, which is more original and less Chinese than prose. The Japanese are very much addicted to writing poetry; like Silas Wegg, they drop off into poetry on every possible occasion. They are, in one sense, “born” poets, and, in another sense, made poets: _poeta Japonicus et nascitur et fit_,—“The Japanese poet is both born and made.” There are certain rigid forms, and only a few, for verse; and all fairly educated Japanese know those forms. In school, moreover, they are carefully taught the theory and the practice of versification. Occasionally a Japanese poem will be rather long, and is then called _naga-uta_, (long poem); but usually it is only a “tiny ode” of 31 syllables, arranged in 5 lines of respectively 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables. The following is a specimen of such an _uta_, or _tanka_, from the famous “Hundred Poems”:— Kokoro-ate ni Orobaya oran Hatsu-shimo no Oki-madowaseru Shiragiku no hana. “If it were my wish White chrysanthemum to cull:— Puzzled by the frost Of the early autumn time, I perchance might pluck the flower.”[134] There is also an abbreviated form called _hokku_, which contains only the 17 syllables of the first 3 lines of the _tanka_. The following is an example:— Kare-eda ni U no tomari keri Aki no kure. “On an autumn evening a crow perches on a withered branch.” The quaintness and simplicity of Japanese thought and expression appear very clearly in their poetry. It has been truly said that a Japanese poem is a picture or even only the outline of a picture to be filled in by the imagination. It may be merely an exclamation, without any logical assertion, like the following, written a thousand years ago:— Shira-kumo ni Hane uchi-kawashi Tobu kari no Kazu sae miyuru Aki no yo no tsuki. “The moon on an autumn night, making visible the very number of wild geese flying past with wings intercrossed in white clouds.”[135] Japanese poetry has no rhyme, no parallelism, no alliteration, no accent; it is almost all lyrical, and abounds in acrostics, anagrams, and palindromes. Its chief subjects are taken from nature, and a poem may be evoked by the simplest thing. Although Japanese poetry is difficult to understand, it is interesting to study. Japanese literature of the new _régime_ is too varied to enumerate, as it covers, in both original and translated work, about all the fields of modern thought, as well as the fields of the old _régime_, just mentioned.