literature. I am not a literary West Pointer; I do not love a literary man as a literary man, as a minister of a pulpit loves other ministers because they are ministers: it is a means to an end, that is all there is to it: I never attribute any other significance to it.” Basho always spoke from the same reason that there was no other poetry except the poetry of the heart; he never thought literature or so-called literature to be connected with his own poetry, because it was a single noted adoration or exclamation offhand at the almost dangerous moment when his love of Nature suddenly turned to hatred from the too great excess of his love. It is the word of exclamation; its brevity is strength of his love. Hokku means literally a single utterance or the utterance of a single verse; that utterance should be like a “moth light playing on reality’s dusk,” or “an art hung, as a web, in the air of perfume,” swinging soft in music of a moment. Now again to return to Whitman. He remarks somewhere: “New York gives the literary man a touch of sorrow; he is never quite the same human being after New York has really set in; the best fellows have few chances of escape.” Although Basho never expressed his hatred of city life in such a bold emphasis of words as Whitman, as his were the days when politeness of language was inculcated, the fact of his spending the greater part of his life, now
