mood of man.

I do not know what human sentiment the principal division of my garden
was intended to reflect; and there is none to tell me. Those by whom it
was made passed away long generations ago, in the eternal transmigration
of souls. But as a poem of nature it requires no interpreter. It
occupies the front portion of the grounds, facing south; and it also
extends west to the verge of the northern division of the garden, from
which it is partly separated by a curious screen-fence structure. There
are large rocks in it, heavily mossed; and divers fantastic basins of
stone for holding water; and stone lamps green with years; and a
shachihoko, such as one sees at the peaked angles of castle roofs--a
great stone fish, an idealised porpoise, with its nose in the ground and
its tail in the air. [5] There are miniature hills, with old trees upon
them; and there are long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs,
like river banks; and there are green knolls like islets. All these
verdant elevations rise from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a
surface of silk and miming the curves and meanderings of a river course.
These sanded spaces are not to be trodden upon; they are much too
beautiful for that. The least speck of dirt would mar their effect; and
it requires the trained skill of an experienced native gardener--a
delightful old man he is--to keep them in perfect form. But they are
traversed in various directions by lines of flat unhewn rock slabs,
placed at slightly irregular distances from one another, exactly like
stepping-stones across a brook. The whole effect is that of the shores
of a still stream in some lovely, lonesome, drowsy place.

There is nothing to break the illusion, so secluded the garden is. High
walls and fences shut out streets and contiguous things; and the shrubs
and the trees, heightening and thickening toward the boundaries, conceal