And as one examines the few records which Japanese writers have given to the Western world, the conviction grows ever stronger that at this time, when the free and romantic love of men and women was a thing alien to the businesslike Japanese marriage system, the one region where love as we understand it might flourish--the one region where might arise those desperate attachments of heart for heart which we regard as heroic--was the isolated enclosure of the Yoshiwara. There no shrewd parents arranged the unwilling, blind match; there the hampered spirits of that day found freedom, however perilous; and there alone men and women, though surrounded by an atmosphere of sordid corruption, faced death as did the Tristram and Iseult of our legends, in the service of a passion more precious than life itself.... For the Oiran could turn lover. KIYONAGA. _Festival Scene._ What gods are these, reborn from gracious days To fill our gardens with diviner mould Than therein dwelling? What bright race of old Revisits here one hour our mortal ways? Serene, dispassionate, with lordly gaze They move through this clear afternoon of gold, Equal to life and all its deeps may hold, Calm, spacious masters of the glimmering maze. What gods are these? or godlike men? whom earth Suffices, in a wisdom just and high That not repines the boundaries of its birth But fills its destined measure utterly-- Finding in mortal sweetness perfect worth, Not yet grown homesick for the wastes of sky. The reader will perhaps have noted how many artists of the preceding period withdrew toward the close of their careers from the field to which a new conqueror had come. This universal victor was Kiyonaga. No other Ukioye artist ever so dominated his period. All earlier print-designers were gradually driven into retirement by his colossal success, and the majority of his contemporaries adopted his style. In him all previously developed resources met; after him began that long decline which led through intermediate stages of such hauntingly lovely decadence to the final death of the art. The Torii School now awoke from its quiescence, and for the second and final time assumed the dominance it had in the days of Kiyonobu. [Illustration: KIYONAGA.] Little is known of Kiyonaga's life. Born in 1742, he worked as a young man for a bookseller in Yedo. He studied painting under Kiyomitsu, became the fourth head of the Torii School, produced the most important portion of his work between 1777 and 1790, and not long after 1790 retired from any large amount of further print-designing. His death occurred in 1815.