alone in its union of grace with majesty. During the Middle Ages, when Fuji's volcanic fires were more active than at present, a commonplace of the poets was to liken the ardour of their love to that which lit up the mountain-top with flame. Another poet earlier still—he lived before the time of King Alfred—sings as follows:
There on the border, where the land of Kai[1]
Doth touch the frontier of Suruga's land,
A beauteous province stretched on either hand,
See Fujiyama rear his head on high!
The clouds of heaven in reverent wonder pause,
Nor may the birds those giddy heights assay
Where melt thy snows amid thy fires away,
Or thy fierce fires lie quenched beneath thy snows.
What name might fitly tell, what accents sing,
Thine awful, godlike grandeur? 'Tis thy breast
That holdeth Narusawa's flood at rest,
Thy side whence Fujikawa's waters spring.
Great Fujiyama, towering to the sky!
A treasure art thou giv'n to mortal man,
A God Protector watching o'er Japan:—
On thee forever let me feast mine eye.
But enough of poetry. The surveyors tell us that Fuji is 12,365 feet high—an altitude easy to remember, if we take for memoria technica the twelve months and the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.[2] The geologists inform us that Fuji is a young volcano, to which fact may be ascribed the as yet almost unbroken regularity of its shape. The beginning of degradation is the hump on the south side, called Hōei-zan from the name of the period when it was formed by the most recent eruption of which history tells. This eruption lasted with intervals from the 16th December, 1707, to the 22nd January, 1708. The geologists further assure us that Fuji had several predecessors in
