in a most delightful way, said it seemed to be the origin of a festival called Tanabata. During this festival the Japanese write poems with dew "from the River of Heaven," which is collected fresh from yam leaves. These poems are written on strips of blue, green, red, yellow and white paper to match the colors of the stars, and are tied on bamboo stalks set up about the houses. Mr. Hearn in his "Romance of the Milky Way" refers to the story in this exquisite manner:
"In the silence of the transparent night, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me out of the scintillant sky, to make me forget the monstrous facts of science and the stupendous horror of space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way, as that awful Ring of Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the abyss, but as the very Amanogwa itself—the river Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, the mists that hover along the verge, and the watergrasses that bend in the winds of autumn. White Orihime I see at her starry loom and the Ox that grazes on the farther shore—and I know that the falling dew is the spray of the Herdsman's oar."
There are any number of references to the Milky Way throughout the realms of poetry. Amelia describes it as
That leadeth upward to the gate of heaven."
Milton—an
Ovid—a "high-road" "whose groundwork is of stars":
Which, when the skies are clear, is seen below,
And mortals, by the name of Milky, know.
The ground work is of stars; through which the road
Lies open to the Thunderer's abode."
—Ovid's Metamorphoses (Dryden's Trans.)
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