CHAPTER XV
GARDEN FOLK-LORE AND LEGENDS—(I)
“Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every Aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.
There was never mystery
But ’tis figured in the flowers;
Was never secret history
But birds tell it in the bowers.”
Emerson.
The garden and flower lore of Japan is strangely impersonal. As in her poetry, there is little of simile, or of the turning of plant life into human beings, or the endowment of personality on inanimate things. It seems as if the Japanese love flowers more for themselves than for the images they evoke, and yet what is love but a divine imagination! A man who loves his mistress for her beauty or for her character alone, who endows her not with transcendental qualities, has a narrow margin of affection on which to draw; that which is all explained is at the end of its interest. How, then, is it that the Japanese—of all the people on this earth the fondest, as a nation, of flowers—without the fairy wand of impersonation to
