Page:Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn.djvu/302

Rh soother of slumber………weaving the thread of a voice that causes love to wander away!………There are Japanese poems scarcely less delicate in sentiment on the chirruping of night crickets; and Meleager's promise to reward the little singer with gifts of fresh leek, and with "drops of dew cut up small," sounds strangely Japanese. Then the poem attributed to Anyte, about the little girl Myro making a tomb for her pet cicada and cricket, and weeping because Hades, "hard to be persuaded," had taken her playthings away, represents an experience familiar to Japanese child life. I suppose that little Myro—(how freshly her tears still glisten, after seven and twenty centuries!)—prepared that "common tomb" for her pets much as the little maid of Nippon would do to-day, putting a small stone on top to serve for a monument. But the wiser Japanese Myro would repeat over the grave a certain Buddhist prayer.

It is especially in their poems upon the cicada that we find the old Greeks confessing their love of insect-melody: witness the lines in the Anthology about the tettix caught in a spider’s snare, and "making lament in the thin fetters" until freed by the poet;—and the verses by Leonidas of Tarentum 註