nature only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have
character, that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning
of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. In the foreigner,
however aesthetic he may be, this feeling needs to be cultivated by
study. It is inborn in the Japanese; the soul of the race comprehends
Nature infinitely better than we do, at least in her visible forms. But
although, being an Occidental, the true sense of the beauty of stones
can be reached by you only through long familiarity with the Japanese
use and choice of them, the characters of the lessons to be acquired
exist everywhere about you, if your life be in the interior. You cannot
walk through a street without observing tasks and problems in the
aesthetics of stones for you to master. At the approaches to temples, by
the side of roads, before holy groves, and in all parks and pleasure-
grounds, as well as in all cemeteries, you will notice large, irregular,
flat slabs of natural rock--mostly from the river-beds and water-worn--
sculptured with ideographs, but unhewn. These have been set up as votive
tablets, as commemorative monuments, as tombstones, and are much more
costly than the ordinary cut-stone columns and haka chiselled with the
figures of divinities in relief. Again, you will see before most of the
shrines, nay, even in the grounds of nearly all large homesteads, great
irregular blocks of granite or other hard rock, worn by the action of
torrents, and converted into water-basins (chodzubachi) by cutting a
circular hollow in the top. Such are but common examples of the
utilisation of stones even in the poorest villages; and if you have any
natural artistic sentiment, you cannot fail to discover, sooner or
later, how much more beautiful are these natural forms than any shapes
from the hand of the stone-cutter. It is probable, too, that you will
become so habituated at last to the sight of inscriptions cut upon rock
surfaces, especially if you travel much through the country, that you
will often find yourself involuntarily looking for texts or other