enchantment.

VIII.

I returned by another way, through a quarter which I had never seen before,—all temples. A district of great spaces, vast and beautiful and hushed as by No dwellings or shops. Pale yellow walls only, sloping back from the roadway on both sides, like fortress walls, but coped with a coping or rooflet of blue tiles; and above these yellow sloping walls (pierced with elfish gates at long, long intervals), great soft hilly masses of foliage-cedar and pine and bamboo-with superbly curved roofs sweeping up through them. Each vista of those silent streets of temples, bathed in the gold of the autumn afternoon, gave me just such a thrill of pleasure as one feels on finding in some poem the perfect utterance of a thought one has tried for years in vain to express.

Yet what was the charm made with? The wonderful walls were but painted mud; the gates and the temples only frames of wood supporting tiles; the shubbery, the stonework, the lotos-ponds, mere landscapegardening. Nothing solid, nothing enduring; but a combination so beautiful of lines and colours and shadows

that no speech could paint it. Nay! even were those earthen walls turned into lemon-coloured marble, and their tiling into amethyst; even were the material of the temples transformed into substance precious as that of the palace described in the Sutra of the Great King of Glory, still the æsthetic suggestion, the dreamy repose, the mellow loveliness and softness of the scene, could not be in the least enhanced. Perhaps it is just because the material of such creation is so frail that its art is so marvellous. The most wonderful architecture, the most entrancing landscapes, are formed with substance the most imponderable,-the substance of clouds.

But those who think of beauty only in connection with costliness, with stability, with "firm reality," should never look for it in this land,-well called the Land of Sunrise, for sunrise is the hour of illusions. Nothing is more lovely than a Japanese village among the hills or by the coast when seen just after sunrise,-through the slowly lifting blue mists of a spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the enchantment passes with the vapours: in the raw, clear light he can find no palaces of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only

flimsy sheds of wood and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks.

So perhaps it is with all that makes life beautiful in any land. To view men or nature with delight, we must see them through illusions, subjective or objective. How they appear to us depends upon the ethical conditions within us. Nevertheless, the real and the unreal are equally illusive in themselves. The vulgar and the rare, the seemingly transient and the seemingly enduring, are all alike mere ghostliness. Happiest he who, from birth to death, sees ever through some beautiful haze of the soul,-best of all, that haze of love which, like the radiance of this Orient day, turns common things to gold.

IV.

DUST.

"Let the Bodhisattva look upon all things as having the nature of space,—as permanently equal to space; without essence, without substantiality."-SADDHARMA-PUNDARÎKA.

I HAVE wandered to the verge of the town; and the street I followed has roughened into a country road, and begins to curve away through rice fields toward a hamlet at the foot of the hills. Between town and rice-fields a vague unoccupied stretch of land makes a favourite playground for children. There are trees, and spaces of grass to roll on, and many butterflies, and plenty of little stones. I stop to look at the children.

By the roadside some are amusing themselves with wet clay, making tiny models of mountains and rivers and rice-fields; tiny mud villages, also,-imitations of peasants' huts, and little mud temples, and mud gardens with ponds and humped bridges and imitations of stone-lanterns (tōrō); likewise miniature cemeteries, with

bits of broken stone for monuments. And they play at funerals,—burying corpses of butterflies and semi (cicada), and pretending to repeat Buddhist sutras over the grave. To-morrow they will not dare to do this; for to-morrow will be the first day of the festival of the Dead. During that festival it is strictly forbidden to molest insects, especially semi, some of which have on their heads little red characters said to be names of Souls.

Children in all countries play at death. Before the sense of personal identity comes, death cannot be seriously considered; and childhood thinks in this regard more correctly, perhaps, than self-conscious maturity. Of course, if these little ones were told, some bright morning, that a playfellow had gone away forever,-gone away to be reborn elsewhere, there would be a very real though vague sense of loss, and much wiping of eyes with many-coloured sleeves; but presently the loss would be forgotten and the playing resumed. The idea of ceasing to exist could not possibly enter a child-mind: the butterflies and birds, the flowers, the foliage, the sweet summer itself, only play at dying;-they seem to go, but they all come back again after the snow is gone.