My bucket-handle round.
I could not break the bands
Of those soft hands.
The bucket and the well to her left,
‘Let me some water, for I come bereft.’”
I see that the lyrical gleam of the original has turned, alas! to prosaic formality: I almost cry that it is hopeless if the poet has to put in two lines (the fourth and fifth) which the original has not (in fact, the translation has ten times more than the original, and spiritually ten times less), and wonder at the poetical possibility of the English mind. And how those rhymes bother my Japanese mind in love with irregularity!
It might be proper to thank, if thank one must, our Japanese moralists for their tireless propagation in popularising the morning-glory, as they find them to be the things fittest for encouraging the habit of early-rising; it seems they do not quite understand how the word simplicity sounds to our modern minds, whose passion, is more psychical, when those good old moralists wish to solve all the questions of the morning-glory with the power of that one
