A Proverb

I have seen a pathway shaded by green great trees,
A road bordered by thickets light with flowers.

My eyes have entered in under the green shadow,
And made a cool journey far along the road.

But I shall not take the road,
Because it does not lead to her house.

When she was born
They shut her little feet in iron boxes,
So that my beloved never walks the roads.

When she was born
They shut her heart in a box of iron,
So that my beloved shall never love me.

From the Chinese.

        [One version of the following song, which I believe to be the genuine one, is written on the last leaf of MS. Harl. 6580, between the lines of a fragment of an old charter, originally used for binding the book, in a hand of the end of the seventeenth century, but unfortunately it is scarcely adapted for the "ears polite" of modern days.]

    A man of words and not of deeds,
    Is like a garden full of weeds;
    And when the weeds begin to grow,
    It's like a garden full of snow;
    And when the snow begins to fall,
    It's like a bird upon the wall;
    And when the bird away does fly,
    It's like an eagle in the sky;
    And when the sky begins to roar,
    It's like a lion at the door;
    And when the door begins to crack,
    It's like a stick across you...

Whene'er my heart love's warmth but entertains,
Oh frost! oh snow! oh hail! forbid the banes.
One drop now deads a spark, but if the same
Once gets a force, floods cannot quench the flame.
Rather than love, let me be ever lost,
Or let me 'gender with eternal frost.

(After Walt Whitman.)


That light, that white, that weird, uncanny substance we call snow
    Is slowly sifting through the bare branches--and ever and anon
My thoughts sift with the drifting snow, and I am full of pale regret.
    Yes, full of pale regret and other things--you know what I mean.
And why? Because the snow must go; the time has came to part.
    Yes, it cannot wait much longer--like the flakes my thoughts are melting
'Tis here, 'tis there, in fact, 'tis everywhere--the snow I mean.
    Like the thick syrup which covers buckwheat cakes it lies.

The man who says he don't regret its passing also lies.
    And wilt thou never come again? Yes, thou ilt never come again. Alas!
How well I remember thee! 'Twas but yesterday, methinks.
    When a great daub...

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?”
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted to us. And then we saw him bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray,
Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes.
The little fellow’s afraid of the falling snow.
He never saw it before. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
He wouldn’t believe when his mother told him, ‘Sakes,
It’s only weather.’ He thought she didn’t know!
So this is something he has to bear alone
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
He mounts the wall again with whited eyes

My desires are like the white snows on Fuji
That grow but never melt.
I am becoming proud of my bad reputation;
And the more men say,
We cannot understand why she loves him,
The less I care.
I am sure that in a very short time
I shall give myself to him.

Japanese Street Song.