Yone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before he was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students, suffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not tried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some friends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin Miller. In 1897 he published _Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a Homeless Snail_, and in the next year _The Voice of the Valley_, a little book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to England, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised himself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the Brixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of verse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn Press (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books, some bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet, _From the Eastern Sea_, and containing, besides those sixteen pages of poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new pieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino. I knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the Embankment in the evenings, or under those “lamp-lights of web-like streets bathed in the opiate mists,” that he and Yoshio Markino have used so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small man, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with black hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese hair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with broadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman’s, like that of a woman controlling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a cigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might serve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those days), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise that he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations were of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held that it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he had read. “I hate your Longfellow,” he said, “and I love your Keats,” and in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an important tendency of his own. He left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had some difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding on the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and travelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published _The Summer Cloud_ in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a two-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by the Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, _The Pilgrimage_, has been issued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews.