Nikko
A green and mossy staircase, a greener and mossier balustraded walk, leads up and along the crest of the hill to the final knoll, atop of which stands the simple bronze urn containing the great Shogun’s body. A more still and solemn, a more peaceful and beautiful resting-place could not be imagined, and the peculiar green twilight reigning under the closely-set cryptomerias, with those long stretches of stone balustrades and embankments, which the forest has claimed for its own and clothed in a concealing mantle of the greenest moss, subdue the most frivolous beholder to silence and seriousness.
On that velvety-green stair-way leading to Iyeyasu's tomb I met, one day, a scholar of fine taste and great culture, a man of distinction in his native West. “I am overwhelmed with the beauty and magnificence of all this,” he said. “I must concede the greatness of any religion that could provide and preserve this, and teach its followers to appreciate it.”
Afterwards, almost on the same step, a dear missionary friend stopped me, with eyes full of tears. “Oh!” she sighed, “this fills me with sadness and sorrow. These emblems and monuments of heathenism! I see nothing beautiful or admirable in those wicked temples. They show me how hard it will be to uproot such heathen creeds. I wish I had not come.”
A woodland path leads around the foot of the great hill on which the Shoguns’ tombs are built, a path laid with large flat stones and set with a rough curbing of loose rocks and bowlders, covered—by the drip and damp and shade of centuries—with a thick green moss. This silent footway leads past many small temples, stone-fenced enclosures, moss-covered tombs and tablets, tiny shrines behind tiny torii, and battered, broken-nosed, and headless Buddhas. Half- hidden tracks, in that gloomy and silent cryptomeria forest, rough-set staircases, roads plunging into the deep shadow of the woods
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