Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/148

 Suppose you stand at that temple’s gate high upon the hill lapped and again lapped by the slow water, with your dreamy face towards this Lake Biwa in the shape of a biwa-lute, which, as a certain poetess has written, “like a shell of white lies dropped by the passing day.” I am sure you will feel yourself to be a god or goddess in the beginning of the world as in the Japanese mythology, who by accident or mystery has risen above the opalescent mists which softly cover the earth of later night.

I did not forget to carry with me the hokku collection of Basho or Buson or some other poet in my American life, even when I did the so-called tramp life in 1896-1898 through the California field full of buttercups, by the mountain where the cypress trees beckoned my soul to fly, not merely because the thought of home and longing for it was then my only comfort, but more because by the blessing of the book, I mean the hokku book, I entered straight into the great heart of Nature; when left the Pacific Slope in later years towards the Eastern cities built by the modern civilisation and machineries, I suddenly thought I had lost the Rh