To give in so many articulate words one’s inmost thoughts and feelings—notably the religious—is taken among us as an unmistakable sign that they are neither very profound nor very sincere. “Only a pomegranate is he”—so runs a popular saying—“who, when he gapes his mouth, displays the contents of his heart.” It is not altogether perverseness of oriental minds that the instant our emotions are moved we try to guard our lips in order to hide them. Speech is very often with us, as the Frenchman defined it, “the art of concealing thought.” Call upon a Japanese friend in time of deepest affliction and he will 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 measure shown that inner working of our minds which often presents an appearance of callousness or of an hysterical mixture of laughter and dejection, and whose sanity is sometimes called in question.