ce--into the
half-closed eyes, that seem to watch you through their eyelids of
bronze as gently as those of a child; and you feel that the image
typifies all that is tender and solemn in the soul of the East. Yet
you feel also that only Japanese thought could have created it. Its
beauty, its dignity, its perfect repose, reflect the higher life of
the race that imagined it, and, though inspired doubtless by some
Indian model, as the treatment of his hair and various symbolic marks
reveal, the art is Japanese.

"So mighty and beautiful is the work that you will for some time fail
to notice the magnificent lotus plants of bronze, fully 15 feet high,
planted before the figure on another side of the great tripod in which
incense rods are burning."

Kaemfer, writing in the seventeenth century, remarked of the Japanese:
"As to all sorts of handicraft, they are wanting neither proper
materials nor industry and application, and so far is it that they
should have any occasion to send for masters abroad, that they rather
exceed all other nations in ingenuity and neatness of workmanship,
particularly in brass, gold, silver, and copper." In metal work the
Japanese have certainly cultivated art to a high degree. Much of that
metal work was, of course, employed in connection with articles which
modern conditions of life in Japan have rendered absolutely or almost
entirely obsolete. The bronze workers of Japan were and indeed are
still famous. Their work as displayed in braziers, incense-holders,
flower-vases, lanterns, and various other articles evinces great
skill, while the effects often produced by the artists in the inlaying
and overlaying of metals with a view of producing a variegated picture
has long been the wonder and admiration of the Western world. It is
almost safe to assert that the finest specimens of work of this kind
can never be reproduced. In casting, too, there was no lack of skill
in old Japan. The big bell at Kyoto, which is 14 feet high by over 9
feet in diameter, is a sufficient object-lesson as to the proficiency
attained in casting in bygone days. Much of the bronze work of Japan,
especially in birds and insects, is to me incomparable. The modern
bronze work of the country, though certainly beautiful, does not in
any respect or any degree approach that of the masters of two or three
hundred years ago. In the manipulation of metals and amalgams these
men have reached a higher standard of perfection than had p