ted and sterilised their paradise,--substituting everywhere for
beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly
hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend
the charm of that which we destroyed."

During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect
musicians," a grass-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was
exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so
small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides
of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about
the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antennae much longer
than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished
against the light.

"He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than
his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...

"By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber
... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the
room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness,
a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric
bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes
swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish
resonance....

"Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and
unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known
in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many
generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the
fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in
a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt
thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was
sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the
exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions
of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses
of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has
forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he
sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust
of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of
time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it.
They call their illusion an Idea