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276 This one example may suffice to show how widely divergent (compared with Europe) are the channels in which Japanese thought flows. Nor is it merely that the idioms differ, but that the same circumstances do not draw from Japanese speakers remarks similar to those which they would draw from European speakers. In accidence also the disparity is remarkable. Japanese nouns have no gender or number, Japanese adjectives no degrees of comparison, Japanese verbs no person. On the other hand, the verbs have peculiar complications of their own. They have a negative voice, and forms to indicate causation and potentiality. There is also an elaborate system of honorifics, which to some extent replaces the use of person in the verb and makes good the general omission of personal pronouns.

The Japanese vocabulary, though extraordinarily rich and constantly growing, is honourably deficient in terms of abuse. It affords absolutely no means of cursing and swearing. An other negative quality is the habitual avoidance of personification,—a characteristic so deep-seated and all-pervading as to interfere even with the use of neuter nouns in combination with transitive verbs. Thus, this language rejects such expressions as "the heat makes me feel languid," "despair drove him to commit suicide," "science warns us against overcrowding," "quarrels degrade those who engage in them." etc., etc. One must say, "being hot, I feel languid," "having lost hope, he killed himself," "on considering, we find that the fact of people's crowding together is unhealthy," and so on,—the idea being adequately rendered no doubt, but at the expense of verve and picturesqueness. Nor can any one fully realise how picturesque our European languages are, how saturated with metaphor and lit up with fancy, until he has familiarised himself with one of the tamer tongues of the Far East. Poetry naturally suffers more than prose from this defect of the language. No Japanese Wordsworth could venture on such metaphorical lines as