Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/145

 of twenty years later I turn my steps again to tell the Japanese students about the English poets born in the golden clime or other clime; and I often looked up with irresistible longing of heart, to a little cottage ona hill in this sacred park where Yeiki Kikakudo, the descendant of the famous hokku poet Kikaku in poetical lineage, used to live in his seventieth year. I cannot recollect now exactly how I happened to call on him one night except from my impulse and determination that my meeting with him was thought necessary for my poetical development; it was the night of meigetsu, the full moon of September, when many wanderers like myself, moths restless after soul’s sensation, could be seen in the park through the shadows of trees. The little house, I mean that of Master Yeiki, so small that it might be comfortably put in any ordinary-sized Western drawing-room, was deadly silent with no light lighted; I thought at once that it was the poet’s beautiful consideration towards the moon whose heavenly light, not being disturbed by any earthly lamp, might thus have full sway. I met the old poet sitting on the step under the golden Rh