The above is anonymous. A few pages further on occurs the second lyric, witten by Hironoha, and bearing the date, A. D. 750:

Near to the valley stands my humble cot,

The village nestles 'neath the cooling shade
Of lofty timber; but the silent glade
Not yet re-echoes with the cuckoo's note.
The morning hour e'er finds me, sweetest bird!
Before my gate; and, when the day doth pale,
I cast a wistful glance adown the vale;

But e'en one note, alas! not yet is heard,

(p. 113.)

Still again, among the Short Stanzas, (p. 119) in a piece attributed to Hitomaro, the cuckoo is associated with the wisteria as representative of early summer :—

In blossoms the wisteria-tree to-day

Breaks forth, that sweep the wavelets of my lake:
When will the mountain cuckoo come and make

The garden vocal with his first sweet lay?

This is far from the Chinese mythological and classicalJapanese notion, which makes the bird a herald of death and dissolution, whose note summons a soul to begin the ascent of the mountain of death. The same struggle is noticeable in English poetry between an unpleasing foreign and a pleasant indigenous conception of the cuckoo. Readers of Horace will remember the passage in the first Book of his Satires (VII, 31), where, in a street encounter, a passer by calls a rustic, cuculum that is, "lazy lubber," by way of contempt 2:

Magna compellans voce cuculum.

In Drayton we discover this South-European conception, which had come to him through Italian literature:

"No nation names the cuckoo but in scorn,"

2 Compare the modern Scotch gowk' stupid fellow.'

It was regarded as a type of selfishness and of unwarranted intrusion into domestic privacy and harmony. The coarse allusions to the cuckoo as an adulterous bird, so common in Elizabethan poetry, die out in the XVIIIth century. The term "cuckold," used contemptuously for weakling, lingered on, and is perhaps last to be met with in Burns's drinking song, Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut. A recent editor of a book of college songs has been ceusured for reproducing the term:

Wha first shall rise to gang awa.

A cuckold, coward loon is he!

Milton in his first sonnet names it 'rude bird of hate'--he calls upon the nightingale to sing :

Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate
Foretell my hapless doom in some grove nigh.

In another sounet he classes it contemptuously with asses, apes, and dogs, animals which have a harsh and unpleasing cry:

When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.

John Bunyan likewise treats the cuckoo very disparagingly, blaming it because it is neither the first to welcome our spring, nor bring us its first tokens. He calls it a “yawlingbawling cuckoo ":

' And since, while here, she only makes a noise
So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,

The Formalist we may compare her to,

For he doth suck our eggs and sing "Cuckoo"!

It must be remembered that the earlier English conception of the bird, like our later and present attitude towards it, is altogether different, being thoroughly friendly. The first English song set to musical notes addresses the cuckoo as a cheerful bird, the messenger of spring:

This freshest and brightest of XVIIIth century lyrics, originally published by Logan in 1770, is now generally ascribed to his friend Michael Bruce. This lyric is a landmark in English poetry, the bugle-note of a new era. Its influence on Wordsworth was undoubted. That a poet should dare to adress seriously so commonplace a thing as a cuckoo, Scottice "gowk," otherwise "fool," was a new thing in polite literature. Here we establish a community with the nature lovers of old Japan, who made excursions to the green valleys of Yamato that they might listen to the cuckoo's voice. It is a noticeable fact that Miss Wordsworth, in her life of her relative, brings in his attitude towards the cuckoo as illustrative of his treatment of nature. While Tennyson, speaking of the bird, uses the language of mere sensation :

The cuckoo told his name to all the hills, Wordsworth speaks in the language of ideas,

O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird,

Or but a wandering voice?

Our present attitude toward the bird may be summed up in the lines of a recent contributor to the London Spectator; and it will be seen how closely this attitude approaches that of the Japanese, as unaffected by Chinese influences:

Forbid the solace of home to know,

Or dutiful ministry's crowning grace,-
Some twist primeval has hardened so
In the long career of a vagrant race;
Though he build no timely nest,
Or semblance of a nest,

In the way admired and best,

His lay enchains the ear

With an elfin power to cheer,—

Cuckoo cuckoo ! cuckoo ! cuckoo !

These

Note.-The Japanese cuckoo, of which there are four varietres, is migratory like the European bird. sub-orders are :—

CUCULUS CANORUS, L. (Common Cuckoo)-Kakko, Ōmu-
shikui; CUCULUS INTERMEDIUS, Vall. (Himalayan
Cuckoo)-Tsutsudori, Ponpondori; CUCULUS POLIOCEPH-
ALUS, Lath. (Little Cuckoo)-Hototogisu, Tokiwa-
dori, Imosedori; CUCULUS HYPERYTHRUS, Gld. (Amoor
Cuckoo) (wintering in China and the Philippines)
Jyu-ichi, Jihishinchō. Of these the third variety is
undoubtedly the poets' favourite. It is velieved to
deposit its eggs in the nest of the Uguisu (Cettia
cautaus) or Japanese nightingale. The Common Cuc-
koo makes use of the nest of the Japanese Bunting
(Hōjiro). Our English cuckoo lays its eggs in the nest
of the wagtail, which makes an affectionate foster-
mother; and also in the hedge-sparrow's nest. The
words of the Fool in Lear will be remembered :-

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it had its head bit off by its young.

A DESCRIPTION OF MY HUT.1

By J. M. DIXON.

[Read February 10, 1892.]

NOTE.-For the original draft of this translation, as well as for much valuable assistance in the explanation of details in the translation and in the introduction, I must acknowledge my great indebtedness to Mr. K. Natsume, a student of English Literature in the Imperial University.

The water incessantly changes as the stream glides calmly on; the spray that hangs over a cataract appears for a moment only to vanish away. Such is the fate of mankind on this earth and of the houses in which they dwell. If we gaze at a mighty town we behold a succession of walls, surmounted by tiled roofs which vie with one another in loftiness. These have been from generation to generation the abodes of the rich and of the poor, and

1 The Japanese title is Hojo-ki. The term Hojo literally signifies ten-feet-square and occurs first in a Buddhist work, the UimaHyo, where Uima is said to have collected a vast audience in a room which was only a hojo. The term came to be used for a priest's hut, then, as is so common in Japanese phraseology, for the priest himself. The term is frequently met with in the literature of the Tokugawa times as applying to the old rector or keeper of a Buddhist temple.