“I am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but wisdom-wreathed syllables.” But he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded accompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees the world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using it as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even in a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of the one take this picture: “Alas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart, kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!” For an example of the other, this idea: “The Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my songs? An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end--my broken-throated lute will never again be made whole.” He is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker with the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations between sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually _is_ the thing that has induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove for himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure elevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale flame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various as they are. Sometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines: “When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill, The universe seems built with me as its pillar! Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the beginning?” Sometimes wistfully: “Alas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under the rain. _My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?_ Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns. _Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake! Where is Truth? Where is Light?_” Sometimes questioning: “My poetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean grey-haired hill, in sober-faced evening. And the next page is Stillness---- And what then, about the next to that? Alas, the God puts his universe-covering hand over its sheets! _Master, take off your hand for the humble servant!_ Asked in vain:---- How long for my meditation?” But it is impossible with the quotations permissible in an article to give an adequate presentment of a poet whose poems are so separate that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression. Noguchi has, like Verlaine, escaped the wisdom of experience; his latest moods are as sky-clear as his first, different though they are in technique and in feeling. Each one of them is a glint of light from a diamond; it is impossible, but in seeing innumerable glints together, satisfactorily to perceive the diamond itself.