CHAPTER V
GARDEN ACCESSORIES (LANTERNS AND PAGODAS)
“The garden ways are dark, the stars are gone
From the dim sky, the lantern gleams alone
Beside the lake, where its dark form reveals
The fire-fly’s spirit prison’d in the stone.”
Perhaps the most characteristically Japanese things in a Japanese garden are the lanterns. If they, and the little pagodas which so much resemble them in effect, were omitted, as well as the small shrines, the charming miniature bridges, and perhaps the most ornamental of the water-basins and well-covers, one who did not know their gardens intimately might easily be deceived into believing them pretty bits of natural scenery. Yet these ornaments, delightful in design, quaint and attractive as they may be, are but accessories after the fact of the garden’s raison d’être. While one hardly ever sees a garden, even of the poorest, which does not boast a lantern of some sort, be it only a little wooden one, resembling a house for birds, every other item which I have named can be dispensed with, and the place
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