"Japanese colour-prints devoted to landscape," writes Mr. Strange, "form a class apart in the art of the world. There is nothing else like them; neither in the highly idealistic and often lovely abstractions of the aristocratic painters of Japan, nor in the more imitative and, it must be said, more meaningless transcripts from nature, of European artists. The colour-print, as executed by the best men of the Japanese popular school, occupies an intermediate place; perhaps thus furnishing a reason why we Westerners so easily appreciate it. Its imagery and sentiment are elementary in the eyes of the native critics of Japanese high art. Its attempts at realism are in his eyes mere evidence of vulgarity. On the other hand these very qualities endear it to us. We can understand the first, without the long training in symbolism which is the essential of refinement to an educated man of the extreme East. And the other characteristic forms, in our eyes, a leading recommendation. In short, the landscapes of artists such as Hiroshige approach more nearly to our own standards, and are thus more easily acceptable to us than anything else in the pictorial arts of China and Japan; while they have all the fascination of a strange technique, a bold and undaunted convention, and a superb excellence of composition not too remote in principle from our own." HOKUSAI. Because thou wast marvellous of eye, magic of fancy, lithe of hand, Because thou didst play o'er many a gulf where common mortals dizzy stand, Because no thing in earth or sky escaped the pryings of thine art, I call thee, who wast master of all, the master with the monkey's heart. Where in the street the drunkards roll--where in the ring the wrestlers sway, Where rustics pound the harvest rice, or fishers sail, or abbots pray, In rocky gorge, or lowland field, or winter heights of mountain air, Wherever man or beast or bird or flower finds place--yea, everywhere Thou standest, as I fancy, rapt in the live play of mass and line, Curiously noting every poise; and in that ugly head of thine Storing it with unsated fierce passion for life's minutest part, Some day to use infallibly--O master with the monkey's heart! Where Kanazawa's thundering shores behold the mounded waters rave, And Fuji looms above the plain, and the plain slopes to meet the wave, There didst thou from the trembling sands unleash thy soul in sudden flight To soar above the whirling waste with awe and wonder and delight. Thou sawest the giant tumult poured; each slope and chasm of cloven brine Called thee; and from the scattered rout one vision did thy sight divine, One heaven-affronting whelming wave in which all common waves have part-- A billow from the wrath of God--O monkey with a master's heart!