behind Oakland to see him at the "Heights," where he sang:

"Come under my oaks, oh, drowsy dusk!
The wolf and the dog; dear incense hour,
When Mother Earth hath a smell of musk,
And things of the spirit assert their power-
When candles are set to burn in the West-
Set head and foot to the day at rest."

It was the ideal spot on earth with balmy air, such a wonder of view at your feet; I fell in love with the place at once, and I thought I could get plenty of the rest which was beyond my reach during two years and seven months that I had already spent in America. More than the place itself, I fell in love with Mr. Miller, whose almost archaic simplicity in the way of living and speech was indeed prophetlike; he said he would be glad to have me stay with him. I decided to do so on the spot.

He said that he had no lesson or teaching to give me, or if he had any, it was about the full value of silence, without the understanding of which one could never read the true heart of Mother Nature; and the heart of Nature, he said, was Love.

"Silence, Love-and simplicity," he exclaimed.

When I retired in the house right next to

his own to sleep that night, I secretly decided that I would become a poet.

II

I was hoeing round and watering the flowers in the plum orchard at the "Heights," when I received a letter from Gelett Burgess, then the editor of the Lark, the now famous, though short-lived, California magazine, saying: "I have several notices of your poems from the Eastern papers, and your work has been very well received." The July of 1896, when my five English poems (let me call them poems) were first printed by Mr. Burgess in the Lark, was certainly the dawn of my new page of American life; with his letter my heart jumped high in joy. Indeed, I confess that the joy I felt then was the greatest of joys, and I never felt anything like it again; to have it once in a lifetime may be said to be lucky enough. Before I sent my poems to the Lark, I submitted one poem to the editor of the Chap Book, Chicago, who wrote, when he printed it: "The current issue of the Lark contains some few pages of verses by Yone Noguchi, and I find that the pleasant opportunity I thought to have of first printing his writing is denied me. Perhaps I am a little

envious." And the poem beginning, " Mystic spring of vapour," which was published in the Philistine in September, was bitterly attacked by a certain Mr. Hudson, of Oakland, as a plagiarism from Poe. I was a devout reader of Poe's poems; it was the only book, beside the work of our famous kokku poet, Basho Matsuo, and a book on Zen Buddhism by Kochi, that I brought to the " Heights." My name began to be known; newspaper men of San Francisco came up the hill to interview me. It was the Examiner that wished me to stand before a camera; alas, I had no decent white shirt to wear then. I borrowed one from my friend, which was two sizes too large; I found, when the picture was taken, that even my clenched fist might easily go in at the neck.

I published my own attitude toward Hudson's attack in the following fashion: "Let critics say what they please! Poetry is sacred to me. It is not art for me, but feeling. My poems are simply my own journal of feelingthe footmark of my experience. I can stand anything but deceiving myself. I am not sorry a bit, if there be an exact correspondence in shape. I am thankful to God for giving me the moment when I felt the same thing with Poe. I cannot understand why you could not feel the same thing with Poe if you want to.

It is not poetry at all, if you must express yourself in some other fashion when you think of one thing.

When he again attacked me on "On the Heights" in the September Lark, he made himself a subject of laughter, even to the editor of the Examiner, who said: "The occurrence of the word 'window' in the first line of Noguchi's and the seventh line of the quoted section from Poe is, of course, a damaging affair for both, and when it is reinforced by the damning fact that 'beauty' is mentioned in the third verse of Noguchi and the fifth verse of the quotation from Poe, the candid reader must admit that the two writers spell according to the same dictionary. It is to be feared, however, that Poe's claims to originality are not on a much better foundation than those of Noguchi. Noah Webster had already published all the words of The Sleeper before Poe, and Dr. Johnson before Webster, and still others before Dr. Johnson."

Most of the Eastern literary magazines did not take Hudson's attack seriously; I was defended by many of them, the Book Buyer, for instance, who remarked: “He has originality enough, if that were the full equipment of a great writer. Beauty and delicacy of thought are in his work, and imagination to

spare. But the imagery is often so exotic as to perplex, as when Oriental music falls on Western ears. But he did not steal his cadences from Poe, nor from anybody else."

I found in the various papers and weeklies poems or other writings addressed to me, mostly in kind and often humorous vein; let me quote one of them as a specimen :

"Yone!

YONE NOGUCHI

(To the tune of“ He's No Farmer”)

As critics lift their carping bray,

Pretend thy hair is full of hay,

Mixed S. Crane middlings, longs and shorts,

With other Poe its odds and orts,

And ravelin shreds-they also say:

Homer is not awake alway,

Shakespeare caught flukes i' his bright sword-play.

Wordsworth is solemn at his sports,

(He is, Yone!)

But thou, train ever round thy lay

Some fragrant wilding of the May:

Graft not its stem with borrowed thoughts,

Nor trim the spray-it bloom aborts

For public, Publishers PAY:

Then blossoms, clustering thick thy bay,
Shall crown thee, Yone!"

The death of the Lark, after a brilliant course of two years, was much lamented through the country; the Chap Book ended