CHAPTER X
GREEN GARDENS
“Tranquillity and peace in this still place,
No more of movement than white birds that stand
Leg deep in water, silent as the land.
Oh! cool green garden, give me of thy grace.”
One of the first things that strike the ‘Foreigner’ (a title the Anglo-Saxon will never willingly assume anywhere; and he has to use the word ‘Native,’ in Japan, for the first time without thereby implying a compliment to his own country) is the absence of vivid colour in Japanese gardens. He has come all a-tiptoe with expectation, perhaps, thinking that the land of the flower-loving Japanese will far surpass in brilliancy and splendour of colour the Gorgeous East, as he has seen it in Egypt and India, even in China. He is chilled and saddened by the slanting rain, which he may have hoped would greet him only in Hiroshige’s and Hokusai’s prints; he cannot yet see the beauty in the delicate, pale ribbons of mist that are laid across the landscape; he is outraged, perhaps, that, having travelled so
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