rom the tiles of its terrace to the encrusted gables that drape it as
with some rich bejewelled mantle falling about it in the most graceful
of folds, it is the very eastern princess of a building standing in the
majesty of her court to give you audience.

A pebbly path, a low flight of stone steps, a pause to leave your shoes
without the sill, and you tread in the twilight of reverence upon the
moss-like mats within. The richness of its outer ornament, so impressive
at first, is, you discover, but prelude to the lavish luxury of its
interior. Lacquer, bronze, pigments, deck its ceiling and its sides
in such profusion that it seems to you as if art had expanded, in the
congenial atmosphere, into a tropical luxuriance of decoration, and grew
here as naturally on temples as in the jungle creepers do on trees. Yet
all is but setting to what the place contains; objects of bigotry and
virtue that appeal to the artistic as much as to the religious instincts
of the devout. More sacred still are the things treasured in the sanctum
of the priests. There you will find gems of art for whose sake only
the most abnormal impersonality can prevent you from breaking the
tenth commandment. Of the value set upon them you can form a distant
approximation from the exceeding richness and the amazing number of the
silk cloths and lacquered boxes in which they are so religiously kept.
As you gaze thus, amid the soul-satisfying repose of the spot, at some
masterpiece from the brush of Motonobu, you find yourself wondering, in
a fanciful sort of way, whether Buddhist contemplation is not after all
only another name for the contemplation of the beautiful, since devotees
to the one are ex officio such votaries of the other.

Dissimilar as are these two glimpses of Japanese existence, in one point
the bustling street and the hushed temple are alike,--in the nameless
grace that beautifies both.

This spirit is even more remarkable for its all-pervasiveness than
for its inherent excellence. Both objectively and subjectively its
catholicity is remarkable. It imbues everything, and affects everybody.
So universally is it applied to the daily affairs of life that there may
be said to be no mechanical arts in Japan simply because all such
have been raised to the position of fine arts. The lowest artisan is
essentially an artist. Modern French nomenclature on the subject, in
spite of the satire to which the more prosaic Anglo-Saxon has subjected
it, is