Shadowings

literature as Riku-Un, wrote the following qua

figures or signs.[26] These represent its

one variety of Japanese sémi are believed

rth, and drinks only dew. This prove

ain fixed time. This proves its f

t or rice. This proves its p

any nest to live in. This proves

he cicada, written twenty-four hundred years ago: on more than on

easons bring forth. Yet art thou the friend of the tillers of the land,-from no one harmfully taking aught. By mortals thou art held in honor as the pleasant harbinger of summer; and the Muses love thee. Ph?bus hi

from the Greek anthology, I have

elicate in sentiment on the chirruping of night-crickets; and Meleager's promise to reward the little singer with gifts of fresh leek, and with "drops of dew cut up small," sounds strangely Japanese. Then the poem attributed to Anyté, about the little girl Myro making a tomb for her pet cicada and cricket, and weeping because Hades, "hard to be persuaded," had taken her playthings awa

eed by the poet;-and the verses by Leonidas of Tarentum picturing the "unpaid minstrel to wayfaring men" as "sitting upon lofty trees, warmed with the great heat of summer, sipping the dew that is like woman's milk;"-and the dainty fragment of

tterer,-thou, the winged, the well-winged,-thou, a stranger, the stranger,-thou, a summer-child, the summer-child! Wilt thou not quickly

ifferent from the cicad? known to the Greeks. Some varieties are truly musical; but the majority are astonishingly noisy,-so noisy that their stridulation is considered one of the great afflictions of summer. Therefore it were va

kana

ni to

no

nse

e cry of the sémi

is being a much more frequent cause of the pitiful cry. The lament

-moving wings, because I have fallen into the savage hand of a boy,

ing a captured sémi thus scream, I became convinced in quite a new way that the stridulatory apparatus of certain insects must not be thought of as a kind of musical instrument, but as an organ of speech, and that its utterances are as intimately associated with simple forms of emotion, as are the notes of a bird,-the extraordinary difference being that the insect has its vocal chords outside. But the insect-world is altogether a world of go

he peculiarities of their own singing insects. But I should not now presume to say that their poets are incorrect in speaking of the "voices" of crickets and of cicad?. The old Greek poets who actually describe insect

imitation of the lyre, chirrup me something pleasan