s hat of leaves and
his beard of moss? Can you not also see in imagination the wild creatures
of the forest with their snouts of many shapes, with their fur of all
kinds? But in Anglo-Saxon poetry you will not find anything like that.
Anglo-Saxon Rune songs create no images. It is this picturesqueness, this
actuality of imagery that is distinctive in Finnish poetry.

In the foregoing part of the lecture I have chiefly tried to interest you
in the "Kalevala." But aside from interesting you in the book itself as a
story, as a poem, I hope to direct your attention to a particular feature
in Finnish poetry which is most remote from Japanese poetry. I have spoken
of resemblances as to structure and method; but it is just in that part of
the method most opposed to Japanese tradition that the greatest interest
lies. I do not mean only the use of natural imagery; I mean much more the
use of parallelism to reinforce that imagery. That is the thing especially
worthy of literary study. Indeed, I think that such study might greatly
help towards a new development, a totally new departure in Japanese verse.
In another lecture I spoke as sincerely as I could of the very high merit
in the epigrammatic forms of Japanese poetry. These brief forms of poetry
have been developed in Japan to perfection not equalled elsewhere in
modern poetry, perhaps not surpassed, in some respects, even by Greek
poetry of the same kind. But there can be no doubt of this fact, that a
national literature requires many other forms of expression than the
epigrammatic form. Nothing that is good should ever be despised or cast
aside; but because of its excellences, we should not be blind to the
possibility of other excellences. Now Japanese literature has other forms
of poetry--forms in which it is possible to produce poems of immense
length, but the spirit of epigrammatic poetry has really been controlling
even these to a great degree.

I mean that so far as I am able to understand the subject, the tendency of
all Japanese poetry is to terse expression. Were it not well therefore to
consider at least the possible result of a totally opposite
tendency,--expansion of fancy, luxuriance of expression? Terseness of
expression, pithiness, condensation, are of vast importance in prose, but
poetry has other methods, and the "Kalevala" is one of the best possible
object lessons in the study of such methods, because of the very
simplicity and naturalness with which they a