(which are not alone for the rich) grow beside the well. Poor and mean, perhaps, you would think these gardens, but I love them for the joy of growing things which they bring into the drab lives of their real owners, for their aspirations more than for their achievements. They are as pathetic, as wistfully beautiful, as is a crushed flower in the street to the lame child who has picked it up and tenderly cherishes it.
The finest of my fancy-owned domains are the grounds of temples, for there stately dignity and grandeur are to be found if ever in Japan, as surroundings and architecture must agree in style. Kaibara Yekken, in his advice to women, says: “Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, being resorts for pleasure, should be sparingly visited before the age of forty.” This adage might have kept me out, but I took to heart rather what he says in another book on the Philosophy of Pleasure (Raku Kun), which Mr. W. G. Aston translates thus: “If we open our hearts to the beauty of Heaven, Earth, and the Ten Thousand Created Things, they will yield us pleasure without limit.”
One loves the quaint old churchyards of England, with their tangled grasses, their occasional flowers, their silence, and their peace, but the temple gardens of Japan are as far removed from such places as graves are. How carefully tended they are—it is their only fault!
