pompon the fierce stallion,
whinnying, curvets, and makes the rider's bronze cuirass ring against the
plates of his shirt of mail, with a sound like the clashing of sword
blades.

"The Chief, clad in bronze and lacquer and silken crape, removing the
bearded masque from his beardless face, turns his gaze to the great
volcano, lifting its snows into the cinnabar sky where the dawn of Nippon
begins to smile.

"Nay! he has already seen the gold-spattered day star, gloriously
illuminating the morning of disaster, rise, a blinding disk, above the
seas. And to shade his eyes, on both of which not even a single eyelash
stirs, he opens with one quick movement his iron fan, wherein upon a field
of white satin there rises a crimson sun."

Of course this hasty translation is very poor; and you can only get from
it the signification and colour of the picture--the beautiful sonority and
luminosity of the French is all gone. Nevertheless, I am sure that the
more you study the original the more you will see how fine it is. Here
also is a Japanese colour print. We see the figure of the horseman on the
shore, in the light of dawn; behind him the still dark sky of night;
before him the crimson dawn, and Fuji white against the red sky. And in
the open fan, with its red sun, we have a grim suggestion of the day of
blood that is about to be; that is all. But whoever reads that sonnet will
never forget it; it burns into the memory. So, indeed, does everything
that Heredia writes. Unfortunately he has not yet written anything more
about Japan.

I have quoted Heredia because I think that no other poet has even
approached him in the attempt to make a Japanese picture--though many
others have tried; and the French, nearly always, have done much better
than the English, because they are more naturally artists. Indeed one must
be something of an artist to write anything in the way of good poetry on a
Japanese subject. If you look at the collection "Poems of Places," in the
library, you will see how poorly Japan is there represented; the only
respectable piece of foreign work being by Longfellow, and that is only
about Japanese vases. But since then some English poems have appeared
which are at least worthy of Japanese notice.

CHAPTER VI

THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to
Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will
have much more influence tha