read the heart of Nature, and also my soul, "separated from the mother, far away, abandoned by his native land and Time," alone in the "dream-muffled canyon," in love with 'Being-formed Nothing," you may read in my Seen and Unseen, the first book of poems published in December of 1896, from a San Francisco press. 66 Thus my first period of learning the English language ended with this simultaneous entering of my first stage of English writing; but I have no hesitation to say that the books were often my sweet companions as when I led the so-called tramp life in the three succeeding years, once alone travelling in the Yosemite Valley, where I took Milton's book of poems, whose organ melody did well match the valley's rhapsodic grandeur. On the other occasion when I walked down from San Francisco to Los Angeles (how I walked those hundreds of miles impresses my present mind as quite wonderful), I was constantly with Shelley, who is the poet bound naturally to come after Keats. I found on my arrival in Los Angeles that my copy of Shelley had been lost; from my immediate desire to get another copy, I engaged to work one week at a wooden-box factory; when I had worked well those seven days, I was able to buy, be sides the Shelley book, Verlaine's book of poems, which appeared in an English translation first at that time. Ever since he is one of my beloved poets. The first impression that I received from that French poet, I should say, awoke in my mind fifteen years later by Enkakuji Temple of Kamakura, where I wrote the following as the end of my poem, Moon Night: "Down the tide of the sweet night (O the ecstasy's gentle rise !) Into Oblivion's ruin white." During the four years that I stayed at Miller's mountain home, I learned more names of English writers and poets and more of their writings, I think, by Miller's accidental talk on them, than in any previous four years, which made me wish to acquaint myself with their works. Often I left the "Heights" for San Francisco to read the books at the city library. It was Miller who initiated me in Thoreau and Whitman. While at San Francisco, sometimes I stayed at a Japanese boarding-house where I was charged nothing, as I made a service of English letter-writing for the proprietor, and sometimes at a certain William Street, one of the most insignificant of little alleys, where my Japanese friends published a comic weekly; here at the latter place, I happened to become an actor in a farce which set the whole town to laughing under the heading "How a Japanese Poet helped a Burglar." One afternoon I was reading a book in the room which was a parlour and sleeping-room and editorial office by turns (we occupied the lower floor, the upstairs rooms were occupied by a Spanish tailor who happened to be out that afternoon) when I became a burglar or thief from my stupidity. A young boy, Spanish or Mexican, about the same age as myself, knocked at my door asking for the key which, he said, might fit the rooms upstairs; it was his intention, he declared, to move the things away by the command of the tailor who had engaged some other house. "I lost the key on my way here," he said. How could my mind of innocence doubt him? I helped him to open the upstairs rooms, and also assisted to move down a few things of some importance; when I found that it was too much to carry them by himself, I offered him my service to help him at least with the large looking-glass. We walked some seven or eight blocks when we were pursued by a large fat Irish policeman, who took us by force to a police station and duly locked us up. The next day I made the first and last public speech of my foreign life to clear myself from the charge. I believe that my little speech was a masterpiece, in which I said that it was a case of Japanese etiquette or humanity turned to crime in America by wrong application. It was my last speech; and I hope that so it may remain. I left California for New York as the stepping-stone to old smoky London. In New York, where my first attempt to sell my poetical wares and my California fame as a poet of two or three years back seemed quite nicely forgotten, I decided to play a sad young poet whose fate was to die in a garret. Nature here did not appeal to me much; and when life grew more interesting to study and speculate on, I again took up my reading of English books with renewed interest. I found a little job in a certain family to wash dishes in the morning and tend the furnace of a winter evening; here I used all my hours for reading the books which I drew freely from the library near by. It was in those days that I read through the whole set of Turgenieff and some parts of Tolstoi; before Turgenieff, Daudet was my favourite author. But I did not forget to read the books of poems; and I wrote a few poems which I published in my first London book, From the Eastern Sea. I was glad that, when my English knowledge, however little it might have been, and my inspiration played together most harmoniously, I could turn out something as follows: "'Twas morn; I felt the whiteness of her brow Over 'Twas noon; Her slightly trembling lips of passion 'Twas eve; The velvet shadows of her hair enfolded me ; 'Twas night; I heard her eloquent violet eyes Whispering love, but from the heaven |