Page:Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn.djvu/268

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The foregoing compositions are by old authors mostly: few modern hokku on the subject have the same naïve quality of picturesqueness. The older poets seem to have watched the ways of the dragon-fly with a patience and a freshness of curiosity impossible to this busier generation. They made verses about all its habits and peculiarities,—even about such matters as the queer propensity of the creature to return many times in succession to any spot once chosen for a perch. Sometimes they praised the beauty of its wings, and compared them to the wings of devas or Buddhist angels; sometimes they celebrated the imponderable grace of its hovering,—the ghostly stillness and lightness of its motion; and sometimes they jested about its waspish appearance of anger, or about the goblin oddity of its stare. They noticed. the wonderful way in which 註