Upon a new-begotten bustling town,
Only to see self-mirrored in their moat
An ivied image where the lotus float.

Some subtle sense of fitness within me was touched as it might have
been a nerve; and instantly the motley crew inside the car became not
merely comic, but shocking. It seemed unseemly, this shuffling off
the stage of the tragic old by the farce-like new. However little
one may mourn the dead, something forbids a harlequinade over their
graves. The very principle of cosmic continuity has a decency about
it. Nature holds with one hand to the past even as she grasps at the
future with the other. Some religions consecrate by the laying on of
hands; Nature never withdraws her touch.



IV.

Zenkoji.

We were now come more than half-way from sea to sea, and we were
still in the thick of Europeanization. So far we had traveled in the
track of the comic. For if Japan seems odd for what it is, it seems
odder for what it is no longer.

One of the things which imitation of Western ways is annihilating is
distance. Japan, like the rest of the world, is shrinking. This was
strikingly brought home that afternoon. A few short hours of shifting
panorama, a varying foreground of valley that narrowed or widened
like the flow of the stream that had made it, peaks that opened and