There often his destroying touch Lingers as with a lulled caress, Adding, to that which has so much, An alien ghostly loveliness. So shall your beauty, crescent, pass From me through many a later hand, Each year more luminous than it was-- O April out of Sunset Land! The career of Hosoda Yeishi as a print-designer began about 1780 at the time when Kiyonaga was in full sway, and lasted until shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century--a date when Kiyonaga had for some years been in retirement. Thus in Yeishi perhaps more fully than in any other artist except Utamaro may be observed the crucial transition from the period of Kiyonaga to the period of complete decline. [Illustration: YEISHI.] Yeishi was originally a noble of high rank who studied under Kano Yeisen, the court painter; and not even in the last years of his career, when vulgarizing influences were dominant, did he lose the refinement and aristocratic delicacy that are his most striking characteristics. Shortly before he became a Ukioye painter he had been attached to the household of the Shogun Iyeharu. It is not difficult to imagine the horror of Yeishi's early circle of associates when he threw over conventionality and station, and plunged into the _vie de Bohème_ of a popular painter. "This youth," remarks Fenollosa, "doubtless shocked all his friends in tiring of the solemn old Chinese poets who had been gliding about in impossible landscapes since Tanyu first labelled them, and of the semi-serious, long-headed old gods who gave knowing winks to their turtles and storks, and in running off to such abominable haunts of the cow-headed Buddhist Satan as Danjuro's theatre-pit, fragrant with the odours of _saki_ and raw fish, or the lantern-hung balconies of merry damsels on the river-boats." But the elegant court gentleman was not destined to sink in the maelstrom. To this underworld he brought his own subtlety of vision and evoked from it figures of unfading beauty. At the outset Kiyonaga was his guide--a guide perhaps too blindly followed. Certainly Yeishi's first productions, superb as they were, cannot be called his most characteristic. Plate 35 is an example. They are wholly in the Kiyonaga manner except that they have a touch of fragility and delicacy that is alien to Kiyonaga. The proportions of the figures are the same, but Yeishi's curves are less naturalistic; they seem the product of one whose hungry visions lapped like waves against the shore of reality, shaping it into contours determined by their own demands. The "feeling of repose" which Mr. Strange notes is not repose at all but weariness. At first the perfect poise of these forms may deceive us; but as we advance along the calendar of Yeishi's work we find it pervaded by a spirit less serene, more high-strung, more drugged with beauty than was Kiyonaga's. [Illustration: YEISHI: THREE LADIES BY THE SEASHORE.