practical; but religious, artistic, philosophic questions were, in the
truest sense of the word, the most practical.

Yanagi went on to tell of his devotion to Blake. He could not
understand "why Englishmen are so cool to him." He asked me how it was
that there was no word about Blake in Andrew Lang's work on English
literature. "I cannot imagine," he said, "why such an intelligent man
could not appreciate Blake." Yanagi regarded Blake as "the artist of
immense will, of immense desire, and a man in whom can be seen that
affirmative attitude towards life, exhibited later by Whitman." Yanagi
spoke also of "Anglo-Saxon nobility, liberty, depth of character and
healthiness," and of "a deep and noble character" in English
literature which he did not find elsewhere. Whitman, Emerson, Poe and
William James were "the crown of America."

As I close this chapter I recall Yanagi's library, in the service of
which, bettering Mark Pattison's example, two-thirds of its owner's
income was for some time expended. I remember the thatched dwelling
overlooking the quiet reed-bound lagoon with its frosty sunrises, red
moonrises and apparitions of Fuji above the clouds seventy miles away.
No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that
room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets
West in harmony. I have made note of his Western books but not of the
classics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in
piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown. I have not
mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful
brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism
to Japan; severe little gilt-bronze figures of deities from China, a
little older; pottery figures of exquisite beauty from the tombs of
Tang, a little later; Sung pottery, a dynasty farther on; Korai
celadons from Korean tombs of the same epoch; and whites and blue and
whites of Ming and Korean Richo. On the wall a black and yellow tiger
is "burning bright" on a strip of blood-red silk tapestry woven on a
Chinese loom for a Taoist priest 500 years ago. Cimabue's portrait of
St. Francis breathes over Yanagi's writing desk from one side, while
from the other Blake's amazing life mask looks down "with its Egyptian
power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism." These
are Yanagi's silent friends. His less quiet friends of the flesh have
felt that this room was a sanc