the glory of the dying Maples. Hot saké warms their blood, and the blazing leaves their hearts. Our artist told me that he nearly froze to death while painting the Maples, but I can scarce believe it when I see the glowing pictures; it seems as though one could almost warm one’s stiff and aching fingers at the open fire of the trees.
This is, after all, but a bald statement of the festivals of Japan, because the day hardly passes in which is not celebrated somewhere or in some way the gracious gifts of Nature, or in which the invisible and benign gods, who exist for the Japanese in every manifestation of life, are not invoked by rites of sacrifice, or worshipped in some outward act of rejoicing. These people have been taught since the earliest recorded era to hold constant communion with the unseen forces of Nature. Ideas which are strange and novel to us are commonplaces—if such things can ever be that—to them. Everything visible and material has its unseen spirit; no humblest tool, no agricultural pursuit, no trade, no profession, but is sanctified by the thought of a guardian deity being a part of it. No house or temple is built, according to their strict laws, without prayers and a calling down of a ghostly blessing upon every part of it, to the very beams and the plaster. The mason’s trowel, the carpenter’s saw, the artist’s brushes, the writer’s pens—and above all his unblemished
