write of them in terms of the volume itself, both as regards subject-matter and appearance. In other words, I should link up my personality and the personality of the book, and make each a part of the other. In this way I should strive to evoke a soul out of this piece of inanimate matter, a something characteristic and structural inherent in this in-organic form which is friendly to me and responds to my mood.

This method is not new, although it has not often been used in Occidental countries. Professor Fenollosa, in his book on Chinese and Japanese art, states that it was universally employed by the Chinese artists and poets of the Sung period in the eleventh century A.D. He calls this doctrine of the interdependence of man and inanimate nature, the cardinal doctrine of Zen Buddhism. The Zen Buddhists evolved it from the still earlier Taoist philosophy, which undoubtedly inspired Li Po and the other great Chinese poets of the seventh and eighth centuries A.D.

VI

In the first poems of this volume, the "Ghosts of an Old House," I have followed the method already described. I have tried to evoke, out of the furniture and surroundings of a certain old house, definite emotions which I have had concerning them. I have tried to relate my childish terror concerning this house—a terror not uncommon among children, as I can testify—to the aspects that called it forth.

In the "Symphonies," which form the second part of this volume, I have gone a step further. My aim in writing these was, from the beginning, to narrate certain important phases of the emotional and intellectual development—in short, the life—of an artist, not necessarily myself, but of that sort of artist with which I might find myself most in sympathy. And here, not being restrained by any definite material phenomena, as in the Old House, I have tried to state each phase in the terms of a certain colour, or combination of colours, which is emotionally akin to that phase. This colour, and the imaginative phantasmagoria of landscape which it evokes, thereby creates, in a definite and tangible form, the dominant mood of each poem.

The emotional relations that exist between form, colour, and sound have been little investigated. It is perfectly true that certain colours affect certain temperaments differently. But it is also true that there is a science of colour, and that certain of its laws are already universally known, if not explained. Naturally enough, it is to the painters we must first turn if we want to find out what is known about colour. We 

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