make. It would not be easy to convince him that in the aesthetic life of a most refined and artistic people these insects hold a place not less important or well-deserved than that occupied in Western civilization by our thrushes, linnets, nightingales and canaries. What stranger could suppose that a literature one thousand years old,—a literature full of curious and delicate beauty,—exists upon the subject of these short-lived insect-pets?
The object of the present paper is, by elucidating these facts, to show how superficially our travellers might unconsciously judge the most interesting details of Japanese life. But such misjudgments are as natural as they are inevitable. Even with the kindest of intentions it is impossible to estimate correctly at sight[1] anything of the extraordinary in Japanese custom,—because the extraordinary nearly always relates to feelings, beliefs, or thoughts about which a stranger cannot know anything.
Before proceeding further, let me observe that the domestic[2] insects of which I am going to speak, are mostly night-singers, and must not be confounded with the semi (cicadae), mentioned in former essays of mine. I think that the cicadae,—even in a
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