These five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain verse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of the writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the Brixton Road is _From the Eastern Sea_, “by Yone Noguchi (_Japanese_),” but though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was turned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The imagery of Noguchi’s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery in Synge’s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine’s poetry French, but the imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless if the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and not a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living breath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but with his conception of the poet, and with his poetry. Noguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur Symons’ _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, which was issued three years later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike himself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats’ to his own, and further removed than Keats’ from that of the hated Longfellow. Symons, writing of Verlaine, says: “Is not his whole art a delicate waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they are, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us, and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily, experience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate part of our spiritual life.” Noguchi lives almost continuously in those moods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his aim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a vessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those moments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult to make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing of a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my duty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In _The Poet_ he says: “The roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die. His song is the funeral chant for his own death of every moment.” And again, of himself: “I sing the song of my heart-strings, alone in the eternal muteness, in the face of God.” And again: “The God-beloved man welcomes, respects as an honoured guest, his own soul and body in his solitude. Lo! the roses under the night dress themselves in silence, and expect no mortal applaud--content with that of their voiceless God.” And again: