What do you think of the fact that the finest poetry ever written upon a Japanese subject by any Western poet, has been written by a man who never saw the land?
But he is a member of the French Academy, a great and true lover of art, and without a living superior in that most difficult form of poetry, the sonnet.

In the time of thirty years he produced only one very small volume of sonnets, but so fine are these that they were lifted to the very highest place in poetical distinction.

I may say that there are now only three really great French poets--survivals of the grand romantic school.
These are Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, and Jose Maria de Heredia.

It is the last of whom I am speaking.

As you can tell by his name, he is not a Frenchman either by birth or blood, but a Spaniard, or rather a Spanish Creole, born in Cuba.