CHAPTER IV
GARDEN STONES
“So wise was Buddha’s prophet in old days,
He spoke, and lo!
The very stones which Nature locks
In silence, listened, and to give him praise,
The great gods changed them into living rocks.”
At first glance it would seem rather absurd to devote a whole chapter to stones, since this book does not pretend to go into the geology of Japan, or even into that of its gardens only; but to slight this subject would be as if, in one’s study of the human body, one neglected the skeleton. The rocks and stones of a garden in Japan are its bones and ribs. Its muscles, nervous system, veins and arteries, and beautiful outer covering of flesh, are its trees and shrubs, its watercourses, pools and wells, its flowering plants. I cannot quote Walt Whitman and say, as he did to the child who asked, “What is the grass?”—“And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” because a lawn is, more often than not, absent from a Japanese garden, and hard-
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