[Footnote 131: This seems to be the name of the hero in the story alluded to above.] * * * * * CLASSICAL POETRY OF JAPAN [_Selections translated by Basil Hall Chamberlain_] INTRODUCTION The poetry of a nation is always the best revealer of its genuine life: the range of its spiritual as well as of its intellectual outlook. This is the case even where poetry is imitative, for imitation only pertains to the form of poetry, and not to its essence. Vergil copied the metre and borrowed the phraseology of Homer, but is never Homeric. In one sense, all national poetry is original, even though it be shackled by rules of traditional prosody, and has adopted the system of rhyme devised by writers in another language, whose words seem naturally to bourgeon into assonant terminations. But Japanese poetry is original in every sense of the term. Imitative as the Japanese are, and borrowers from other nations in every department of plastic, fictile, and pictorial art, as well as in religion, politics, and manufactures, the poetry of Japan is a true-born flower of the soil, unique in its mechanical structure, spontaneous and unaffected in its sentiment and subject. The present collection of Japanese poetry is compiled and translated into English from what the Japanese call "The Collection of Myriad Leaves," and from a number of other anthologies made by imperial decree year by year from the tenth until the fifteenth century. This was the golden age of Japanese literature, and nowadays, when poetry is dead in Japan, and the people and their rulers are aiming at nothing but the benefits of material civilization, these ancient anthologies are drawn upon for vamping up and compiling what pass for the current verses of the hour. The twenty volumes of the "Myriad Leaves" were probably published first in the latter half of the eighth century, in the reign of the Mikado Shiyaumu; the editor was Prince Moroye, for in those days the cultivation of verse was especially considered the privilege of the princely and aristocratic. A poem written by a man of obscure rank was sometimes included in the royal collections, but the name of the author never. And indeed some of the distinctive quality of Japanese poetry is undoubtedly due to the air in which it flourished. It is never religious, and it is often immoral, but it is always suffused with a certain hue of courtliness, even gentleness. The language is of the most refined delicacy, the thought is never boorish or rude; there is the self-collectedness which we find in the poetry of France and Italy during the Renaissance, and in England during the reign of Queen Anne. It exhibits the most exquisite polish, allied with an avoidance of every shocking or perturbing theme. It seems to combine the enduring lustre of a precious metal with the tenuity of gold-leaf. Even the most vivid emotions of grief and love, as well as the horrors of war, were