So-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in the moment of waking, asked himself: “Are you So-shi who has dreamed that he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he is So-shi?” That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone Noguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to find reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in doubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching for the reality in things beyond touch or description. “My soul,” he writes: “My soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled body, hunting for a casement to fly out. Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky! Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the mirrory rivulet! Is this world the solid being?--or a shadowy nothing? Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks down?” And again: “The world is not my residence to the end! Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on the darkling hill-top! Isn’t there chance for my flying out?” The world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our language, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation of conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have turned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of poetry.[12] But I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the immaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. “I have cast the world,” he says, “and think me as nothing, “Yet I feel cold on snow-falling day, And happy on flower day.” Let me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his physical existence.