“Where, hard by tiny streams that murmur with a sound like voices of little birds, the dragon-flies, those living flowers of the reeds, chase each other at play.

“Child, art thou not one of those dragon-flies, following after me to console me?  Ah, it is in vain that thou tryest to hide thy wings; thou dost walk, indeed, but well thou knowest how to fly!

“O little fairy with the blue corsage whom I knew even from the time I was a baby in the cradle; seeing again thy sweet face, I think of the rushes that border the little stream of my native village!

“Dost thou not wish that even now as faithful lovers we return to those green fields?  O dragon-fly, take thy wings again, and I—­I will burn all my poetry,

“And we shall go back, under the light of the sky more fresh and pure than this, each of us in the original form—­I to run about, and thou to hover in the air as of yore.”

The sight of a child’s face has revived for the poet very suddenly and vividly, the recollection of the village home, the green fields of childhood, the little stream where he used to play with the same little girl, sometimes running after the dragon-fly.  And now the queer fancy comes to him that she herself is so like a dragon-fly—­so light, graceful, spiritual!  Perhaps really she is a dragon-fly following him into the great city, where he struggles to live as a poet, just in order to console him.  She hides her wings, but that is only to prevent other people knowing.  Why not return once more to the home of childhood, back to the green fields and the sun?  “Little dragon-fly,” he says to her, “let us go back! do you return to your beautiful summer shape, be a dragon-fly again, expand your wings of gauze; and I shall stop trying to write poetry.  I shall burn my verses; I shall go back to the streams where we played as children; I shall run about again with the joy of a child, and with you beautifully flitting hither and thither as a dragon-fly.”

Victor Hugo also has a little poem about a dragon-fly, symbolic only, but quite pretty.  It is entitled “La Demoiselle”; and the other poem was entitled, as you remember, “Ma Libellule.”  Both words mean a dragon-fly, but not the same kind of dragon-fly.  The French word “demoiselle,” which might be adequately rendered into Japanese by the term ojosan, refers only to those exquisitely slender, graceful, slow-flitting dragon-flies known to the scientist by the name of Calopteryx.  Of course you know the difference by sight, and the reason of the French name will be poetically apparent to you.

  Quand la demoiselle doree
  S’envole au depart des hivers,
  Souvent sa robe diapree,
  Souvent son aile est dechiree
  Aux mille dards des buissons verts.

  Ainsi, jeunesse vive et frele,
  Qui, t’egarant de tous cotes,
  Voles ou ton instinct t’appele,
  Souvent tu dechires ton aile
  Aux epines des voluptes.