Sept haï-kaïs "La petite tortue ...", is only seventeen measures long—the number of syllables in a Japanese haiku. Alexis Roland-Manuel remarked on this "mélodie": "Do not let your modesty make you forget a certain fable by La Fontaine. You hurry slowly, perhaps, but none of your steps are wasted. How many hares envy you!" The harmony is pricked with fine, expressive dissonances. For the third "mélodie", "Le coq ...", the instruments "peck" the melody with appoggiaturas in a spirit similar to that in Ravel's "Histoires naturelles" (1906). According to Andrieu, "Maurice Delage's composition is simple and refined; the composer stays ever attentive
Murō Saisei his life. In 1902, he left Kanazawa High Elementary school (equivalent to junior high school today) and started working as a clerk at the Kanazawa Regional Court. His bosses included Haiku-readers such as Kawagoe Bukotsu (河越風骨) and Akakura Kinpu (赤倉錦風) who taught him how to read/compose haiku. After numerous applications to local newspapers, his haiku was first published on October 8, 1904 in Hokkoku Shimbun. Then he used pseudonym of "Terifumi" (照文). Eventually, he also started writing poems and tanka (a Japanese poem of thirty‐one syllables). He started to use his pen name - Saisei - in 1906. The name