Come thou and good luck bring me, to happy fortune help me.

Make thou to move the foliage, the fruit tree to be shaken, and the wild beasts drive thither, the largest and the smallest, with their snouts of every kind, with their paws of fur of all kinds!" Now when you look at these little prayers, when you read them over and observe how pretty they are, you will also observe that they make little pictures in the mind.

Can not you see the fish gliding over the black border under the dark level of the water, to the net of a hundred fishers?
Can you not see the "dear king of the wood," with his hat of leaves and his beard of moss?
Can you not also see in imagination the wild creatures of the forest with their snouts of many shapes, with their fur of all kinds?
But in Anglo-Saxon poetry you will not find anything like that.
Anglo-Saxon Rune songs create no images.

It is this picturesqueness, this actuality of imagery that is distinctive in Finnish poetry.
In the foregoing part of the lecture I have chiefly tried to interest you in the "Kalevala." But aside from interesting you in the book itself as a story, as a poem, I hope to direct your attention to a particular feature in Finnish poetry which is most remote from Japanese poetry.

I have spoken of resemblances as to structure and method; but it is just in that part of the method most opposed to Japanese tradition that the greatest interest lies.