These figures of Shunman, sketched with the curious uneasiness of line of which I speak, stand before backgrounds of equal strangeness. The landscapes seem instinct with an obscure life; the Talking Oak of Dodona was never more haunted than are they. His great six-sheet composition, "The Six Tamagawa," is positively disturbing in the feeling of supernatural forces that it awakens. As Fenollosa says: "Everything he does has a strange touch. The Kiyonaga face becomes distorted with a sort of divine frenzy; trees grope about with their branch-tips like sentient beings; flowers seem to exhale unknown perfumes, and the waters of his streams writhe and glide with a sort of reptilian fascination." Or, as Mr. Arthur Morrison puts it: "There is a touch of fantasy in most of his published designs, as well as in some of his original pictures--an atmosphere as of some strange country where the trees, the rocks, the flowers, and the streams are alive with human senses and mysterious communion." For reasons not wholly clear, the work of Shunman is received by the Japanese connoisseurs with more favour than that of most Ukioye artists. Some obscure quality of restraint and imagination relates him to the older classical schools in a way that makes him acceptable to their aristocratic exclusiveness of taste. Shunman's best prints are so rare as to be beyond the dreams of the ordinary collector. His complete "Tamagawa" is a work for which all the great collectors in the world compete. His smaller prints and book-illustrations are, however, procurable; and his surimono are excellent and fairly numerous. His pillar-prints, of which only three or four designs are known to me, are remarkably fine. KITAO MASANOBU. _Two Women._ What floors have ye trod? What sky-paven places have opened their halls to your eyes? What light was yours, through summerward spaces watching the swallow that flies? What holy silence has touched your faces--what hush of paradise? I think that he died of a longing unspoken who dreamed you to walk in our ways. The wheel at the cistern, the pitcher is broken: ye wot not that dust decays-- Ye, torn from the heart of the dreamer as token to dreamers of other days.