Pale Autumn with ethereal glow Hovered your delicate figure near; And ever round you whispered low Her voices, and the dying year.
A year--a day--and then the leaves Purpureal, ashen, umber, red, Wove for you both through waning eves A gorgeous carpet gloomward spread.
And with that waning, you had gone, Through changes that love fears to trace-- No later lover could have known Your wistful and alluring face--
Your music, quivering in thin air, Had fled with life that filled your veins-- But he for whom you were so fair Dreamed; and the troubled dream remains.
Time, that is swift to smite and rend The common things that spring from earth, Dares not so surely set an end To shapes of visionary birth.
There often his destroying touch Lingers as with a lulled caress, Adding, to that which has so much, An alien ghostly loveliness.
So shall your beauty, crescent, pass From me through many a later hand, Each year more luminous than it was-- O April out of Sunset Land!
The career of Hosoda Yeishi as a print-designer began about 1780 at the time when Kiyonaga was in full sway, and lasted until shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century--a date when Kiyonaga had for some years been in retirement. Thus in Yeishi perhaps more fully than in any other artist except Utamaro may be observed the crucial transition from the period of Kiyonaga to the period of complete decline.
Yeishi was originally a noble of high rank who studied under Kano Yeisen, the court painter; and not even in the last years of his career, when vulgarizing influences were dominant, did he lose the refinement and aristocratic delicacy that are his most striking characteristics. Shortly before he became a Ukioye painter he had been attached to the household of the Shogun Iyeharu. It is not difficult to imagine the horror of Yeishi's early circle of associates when he threw over conventionality and station, and plunged into the _vie de Bohème_ of a popular painter. "This youth," remarks Fenollosa, "doubtless shocked all his friends in tiring of the solemn old Chinese poets who had been gliding about in impossible landscapes since Tanyu first labelled them, and of the semi-serious, long-headed old gods who gave knowing winks to their turtles and storks, and in running off to such abominable haunts of the cow-headed Buddhist Satan as Danjuro's theatre-pit, fragrant with the odours of _saki_ and raw fish, or the lantern-hung balconies of merry damsels on the river-boats."