least be said of Japan that it is
the only nation in the world's history which has entertained such
aspirations and has sought to give effect to them.

CHAPTER XXI

A VISIT TO SOME BUDDHIST TEMPLES

I was lying awake in my room in the Myako Hotel, the window looking
out across the town below towards the eastern hills and framed with
clusters of red maple. It was the clear stillness of a frosty morning
before dawn, not motion enough in the autumn air to stir a ripe red
maple leaf, and as I lay in bed suddenly the air itself seemed to
heave a sigh of music mellow, soft, and yet full, gradual in its
coming as in its going, all-pervading, strange and wonderful.
Stillness again, and then it came again, or rather not so much came as
was there, and then was not there; for it seemed to come from no
whither, and to leave not even the footprint of an echo in the air
behind. There was sanctity in the very sound itself. Its music was
like vocal incense arising before the "awful rose of dawn," beyond
those purple eastern hills. How unlike, I thought, the jar and
clangour of our church bells in London on a Sunday morning rattling
like a fire alarm, whose only possible religious suggestion is to
tumble out of bed to escape the flames of hell. The musical summons of
this bell was sufficient, however, to induce me to go out for a stroll
through the temples in the morning twilight.

All on the crest of the hill behind the hotel is a row of temples
crowning the height. One mounts a flight of steps and then comes on
avenues with rows of ancient trees on either side that make the
avenues look like great aisles of which the immense trees are the
columns supporting the deep, blue roof. Nothing is more striking about
these temples than the delightful harmony between their natural
surroundings and the buildings themselves. They blend so perfectly
that one loses sight of the meeting between nature and art. From the
steps onward all seems a harmonious part of the sanctified whole.
Trees, creepers, and natural flowers peep in and almost entwine
themselves with the marvellously painted or carved foliage of the
temple itself. The rich lichens and mosses of the tree-trunks vie in
depth and beauty of colour with the inlaid traceries of the columns.

Early as the hour was I was not alone in the first temple I came to.
With tinkling steps of wooden shoes a little woman pattered up the
stone stairs to one of the shrines, pulled the heavy c