JAPAN
ITS HISTORY ARTS AND LITERATURE
Chapter I
PRESENT JAPAN
Japan, since the resumption of her intercourse with Western nations forty years ago, has attracted much attention and inspired an extraordinarily large number of book-makers to discuss her beauties and her quaintnesses. Not one of these many authors has been wholly condemnatory. Most of them found something to admire in the manners and customs of her people, and all were charmed by her art and her scenery. Certainly, in the matters of seascape and landscape, Nature has been profusely kind to the Isles of Nippon. They rise out of the sea with so many graces of form, and lie bathed in an atmosphere of such sparkling softness, that it is easy to sympathise with the legend ascribing their origin to crystals dropped from the point of the Creator's spear. That they fell from some heaven of generous gods is a theory more consonant with their
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