Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/73

 without being troubled with any restlessness of mind, but with all Browning's content in his little song, I can face, as a man should, Nature who has changed her red dress of Spring for this greenness of early Summer, and do thrice exclaim, “Oh, green life,” as Fiona McLeod exclaimed, although I may mean that quite differently; if I thank God for the trees as I do, it is not for their flowers or fruits but for their green leaves under whose magical spell I revive my own youthfulness and am glad again to start life anew making, so to say, an eighth rise after seven falls. I confess I had not heard before our mountain cuckoos; my imagination would be glad to think of them, like Words-worth, as an invisible thing, a voice, a mystery, never seen but eternally longed for; are they not like the English cuckoos, a winged ghost of the hope or love of the golden time we wish to command? Although the bonitos have lost their dignity lately, I dare say, among modern Japanese, the above ‘seventeen syllables,’ a voice of not only the poet but the populace, must have been written at the time of the height of the old Japanese civilization that is Rh