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 hardly conceivable as belonging to the vegetable kind, what a sensitiveness more than human; there’s no wonder when one can read every change of the hour and even minute of the day in their look and attitude. I often ask myself why they do not speak a word of grief or joy, when they fade away with their spirits of flight across the seas of the unknowable; perhaps they do speak it, although my ears seem not to hear it at all.

When Kaga no Chiyo, the lady hokkushi or seventeen-syllable poetess of some two hundred years ago, wrote—

I see at once, not the moral teaching, although the commentator wishes to bring it out first, but one beautiful emotion of accident realised by the morning-glory and her heart with the summer dawn as a background. But where Sir Edwin Arnold translated Chiyo's poem into the following English:

The morning-glory Her leaves and bells has bound Rh