say that this pleasure of autumn is toned with[1] melancholy. Those plaintive voices evoke the memory of vanished years and of vanished faces, and so to Buddhist thought recall the doctrine of impermanency. Spring is the period of promise and of hope ; autumn, the time of remembrance and of regret. And the coming of autumn’s special insect, the soundless dragon-fly,—voiceless in the season of voices,—only makes weirder the aspects of change. Everywhere you see a silent play of fairy lightnings,—flashes of color continually intercrossing, like a weaving of interminable enchantment over the face of the land. Thus an old poet describes it:—
Kurenai no
Kagerō hashiru
Tombo kana!
Like a fleeting of crimson gossamer-threads, the flashing of the dragon-flies.
III
For more than ten centuries the Japanese have been making verses about dragon-flies; and the subject remains a favorite one even with the younger poets of to-day. The oldest extant[2] poem about a
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