Looking at the collection of Japanese prints, large and fine, in the Boston Museum, I have had a good time. I found browns etherealized to grey, with vast, uncanny, spacial suggestiveness. This is background of Horunobu. He has an orange I remember. It has lost its fire, to be sure, with years; vicissitudes of change. Now it keeps merely memory of some sun of summer of long ago. He combines this with what a prosaic person would call green, but which is a Roman olive orchard in the autumn. He has colors that float with maddening indecision between pink, yellow, brown, grey, blue, green, to unite the shores of the unseen, to surprise then delight. Koriusai has the weary, meditative violet of gay fête-days that fail. And a red, full of joy as throat of a thrush. I wish they could sing me back, these music-winged colors, out of the sad, beseiging, present, through radiant centuries, to some fabulous, gold-lacquered Palace of Tang! Kiyonaga made a print where cherry blossoms veil with pink mist the shores of the Sumida, and women wear plain robes of faded hues while their faces keep archaic calm. Kiyonaga is unique for reds. He has widened with them the gamut of emotion. Some reds are tragic; some terrible. Some are hesitating. Some are sullen, brooding, regretful. Some weigh heavily with memory of deeds not forgotten. Some indiscreet, too full of meaning. I know a print by Shunsho that makes me cool. It is green, black, grey. There is an old man with twist of coral silk about his waist. The green, one faint stain, gives refreshing sensation of accumulated springs. In the grey I have watched the monstrous blackening clouds of midsummer tempests swing. I know an Utamaro, which is the loveliest thing in existence! Two tall women. One wears enchanting faded pink, one of the unforgettable colors of poet-print-makers; the misty brown that floats above paper with silken shining threads, only Japan could make. The added splendor of incomparable accents of black. The pauses in South American tango dancers, are like these black accents in Eastern art. If you think black is just black, go to the East. Learn! There are blacks that surpass in depth, mystery, a thousand nights of Egypt. Inexplainable, dreadful, has been the fate of the dreamers of the world who have carried to heights the power of vision. A curse followed them, because they dared cross boundaries of the commonplace. To look long upon the sun, is to go blind. I am thinking of Heine. Heine liked his place of exile, France. It was a Promised Land for Children of the Spirit. He hated England, because England did not possess mental flexibility. Lermontov, the Russian poet, disliked England too, and for the same reason. In Heine there was the broad culture of Germany, lightness of the Latin, and the commanding passion of the Hebrew. The first thing I did in Paris, was to search out his grave. No one in Paris was more alive, more real, than he.