The day unfolds like a lotos-bloom, Pink at the tip, and gold at the core, Rising up swiftly through waters of gloom That lave night’s shore; or this vision of— The cloud-like curve, The loosened sheaf, The ineffable pink of a lotos leaf. One great charm of the imagery in Mrs. Fenollosa’s Japanese poems is its subtlety of suggestion. The imagination has play; something is left for the fancy of the reader, which can scarcely be said of some of the highly wrought verse of our own country. The first lyric in the collection hints of a score of things beyond its eight-line scope: O let me die a singing! O let me drown in light! Another day is winging Out from the nest of night. The morning glory’s velvet eye Brims with a jewelled bead. To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly, The world a swaying reed! “To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly,”—a wingéd incarnation of liberty and joy; “the world a swaying reed,”—a pliant thing made for my delight, an empery of which I am the sovereign and may have my will. [Illustration: Mary McNeil Fenollosa] But these Japanese songs have not wholly the lighter melody; there are those that sing of the devastation of the rice-fields after the floods, a grim and tragic picture; and there are interpretations of the dreams of the great bronze Buddha, looking with sad, inscrutable eyes upon the pilgrims who, with the recurrent seasons, come creeping to his feet like insects from the mould; and there is a story of “The Path of Prayer,”—a Japanese superstition so human that one is glad of a religion where sentiment overtops reason. It pictures one walking at evening under gnarled old pines until he chances upon a hidden path leading through a hundred gates that keep a sacred way; and as he passes he is amazed to see along the route, springing as if from the earth, fluttering white papers, tied As banners pendent from a mimic wand. The poem continues: I wondered long; when, from the drowsy wood, A whisper reached me, “’Tis the Path of Prayer, Where, nightly, Kwannon walks in pitying mood, To read the sad petitions planted there.” Ah, simple faith! The sun was in the west; And darkness smote with flails his quivering light. Beside the path I knelt; and, with the rest, My alien prayer was planted in the night. It is to be regretted that Mrs. Fenollosa gives us so little of the religious or mystical in Japanese thought, since no country is richer in material of the sort, and especially as the isolated poems and passages in which she touches upon it are all so interpretative. She has one poem, a petition of old people at a temple, that strikes deep root both in pathos and philosophy. Perhaps the Japanese excel all other peoples in the reverence paid to age, and yet no excess of consideration can supplant the melancholy of that time. The second stanza of Mrs. Fenollosa’s poem expresses the aloofness of the old,—