You do not see the shore; you do not see the main; you are looking but at the border-land of that great unknown, the heaving ocean still slumbering beneath its chilly coverlid of mist, out of which come the breakers, and the sun, and the cranes.
So much for the more serious side of Japanese fancy; a look at the lighter leads to the same conclusion.
Hand in hand with his keen poetic sensibility goes a vivid sense of humor,--two traits that commonly, indeed, are found Maying together over the meadows of imagination.

For, as it might be put, "The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers Is also the first to be touched by the fun." The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact.

His art, wherever fun is possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter.

From the oldest masters down to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits.
It is of all descriptions, too.

Now it lurks in merry ambush, like the faint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtile that the observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meant what seems more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out into the broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy incongruities.