The mention of a Japanese poem gives me an opportunity to say something about Japanese poetry. Like other early people, our forefathers in archaic time liked to express their thoughts in a measured form of language. The whole structure of the tongue being naturally melodious, on account of its consisting of open syllables with clear and sonorous vowels and little of the harsh consonantal elements in them, the number of syllables in a line has been almost the only feature that distinguished our poetry from ordinary prose composition. The taste for a lengthened form of poems had lost ground early, and already at the end of the ninth century after Christ the epigrammatic form exemplified above, consisting of thirty-one syllables, established itself as the ordinary type of the Japanese odes. This form subdivides itself into two parts, viz., the upper half containing three lines of five, seven, and again five syllables, and the lower half consisting of two lines of seven syllables each. This simplicity has made it impossible to express in it anything more than a pithy appeal to our lyrical nature; epic poetry in the strict sense of the word has never been developed by us. But it must be noticed that it is this simplicity of form of our poetical expression that has put it within the reach of almost everybody. To all of us without distinction of class and sex has been accorded the sacred pleasure of satisfying and thus developing our poetical nature, so long as we had a subject to sing and could count syllables up to thirty-one. The language resorted to in such a composition was at first the same as that in use in everyday life. But afterwards as succeeding forms of the vernacular gradually deviated from the classical type, a special grammar along with a special vocabulary had to be studied by the would-be poet. This was avoided, however, by the development in the sixteenth century of a popular and still shorter form of ode called _Hokku_, with much less strict regulations about syntax and phraseology. This ultra-short variety of Japanese poetry, consisting only of seventeen syllables, is in form the upper half of the regular poem. Here is an example:-- _Asagaho ni_ _Tsurube torarete_ _Morai-midzu._ Sketchy as it is, this tells us that the composer Chiyo, 'having gone to her well one morning to draw water, found that some tendrils of the convolvulus had twined themselves around the rope. As a poetess and a woman of taste, she could not bring herself to disturb the dainty blossoms. So, leaving her own well to the convolvuli, she went and begged water of a neighbor'--a pretty little vignette, surely, and expressed in five words.