“O, wash me and wash me again with thy light, And burn my body to a flame of soul! It is this moment that I conquer the intervention of flesh, And its rebellions that worked in me at unexpected time. It’s not too much to say I am a revelation or a wonder, Winging as a falcon into the breast of loveliness and air.” And again: “... What a bird Dreams in the moonlight is my dream, What a rose sings is my song.” “O, to lose the world and gain a song,” he cries, and then, “I am glad to be no-man to-day, with the laughter and dance of the sea soul.” His thoughts fall like leaves in autumn “on the snowy cheeks of his paper.” His is the poetry of self-abnegation, of identification of himself with the world. His soul dances “on the silver strings” of the rain. “We,” he sings, are “happy to be biographers of each other, I and a bird.” He flies himself as a kite, to be lifted or let fall by the winds that do not move at all those whose pride is in their sage and measured footsteps on the ground. In the last of his volumes there are a few specimens of Japanese seventeen-syllabled verse, _hokku_, and in a note Noguchi writes that such a poem “in Japanese mind, might be compared with a tiny star, I dare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. Its value depends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet’s chief aim is to impress the reader with the high atmosphere in which he is living.” The Hokku poet, like Noguchi, never writes of the thing about which he is writing. The emotions he wishes to express are too subtle for description in words, and can only be written of in the spaces between the lines, just as between the petals of a flower we may find dreams that the flower has never known, and the suggestions of something less ponderable than the earth in which it had its roots. An example of Hokku poetry will illustrate the method of all Noguchi’s: “Where the flowers sleep, Thank God! I shall sleep to-night. Oh, come, butterfly.” That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in themselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in the wine in which they are dissolved. In Noguchi’s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: “In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be!” In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost meaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody. In Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can scarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes: