resents for us
the Japanese wife, worshipfully loving;--Hikoboshi appears to us with
none of the luminosity of the god, but as the young Japanese husband
of the sixth or seventh century, before Chinese ethical convention
had begun to exercise its restraint upon life and literature. Also
these poems interest us by their expression of the early feeling for
natural beauty. In them we find the scenery and the seasons of Japan
transported to the Blue Plain of High Heaven;--the Celestial Stream
with its rapids and shallows, its sudden risings and clamourings
within its stony bed, and its water-grasses bending in the autumn
wind, might well be the Kamogawa;--and the mists that haunt its shores
are the very mists of Arashiyama. The boat of Hikoboshi, impelled by
a single oar working upon a wooden peg, is not yet obsolete; and at
many a country ferry you may still see the _hiki-fun['e]_ in which
Tanabata-tsum['e] prayed her husband to cross in a night of storm,--a
flat broad barge pulled over the river by cables. And maids and wives
still sit at their doors in country villages, on pleasant autumn days,
to weave as Tanabata-tsum['e] wove for the sake of her lord and lover.

* * * * *

--It will be observed that, in most of these verses, it is not the
wife who dutifully crosses the Celestial River to meet her husband,
but the husband who rows over the stream to meet the wife; and there
is no reference to the Bridge of Birds.... As for my renderings, those
readers who know by experience the difficulty of translating Japanese
verse will be the most indulgent, I fancy. The Romaji system of
spelling has been followed (except in one or two cases where I thought
it better to indicate the ancient syllabication after the method
adopted by Aston); and words or phrases necessarily supplied have been
inclosed in parentheses.

Amanogawa
Ai-muki tachit['e],
Waga ko[:i]shi
Kimi kimasu nari
Himo-toki mak['e]na!

[_He is coming, my long-desired lord, whom I have been waiting
to meet here, on the banks of the River of Heaven.... The
moment of loosening my girdle is nigh!_[7]]

[Footnote 7: The last line alludes to a charming custom of which
mention is made in the most ancient Japanese literature. Lovers,
ere parting, were wont to tie each other's inner girdle (_himo_) and
pledge themselves to leave the knot untouched until the time of their
next meeting. This poem is said to have be