Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/225

 to make holiday. Sometimes people flocked to watch the spring sun rise above the cherry-blossoms at Sagano; sometimes they went to see autumn moonlight bathe the maples by the Oi-gawa. Sometimes they lavished great sums on brilliant festivals in honour of the numerous deities, whose places of worship had now become comparatively magnificent in architectural proportions and interior decoration. Many of the graces that distinguished all phases of Japanese mediæval life and all branches of Japanese mediæval art were still wanting, or only present in embryo, the models and fashions imported wholesale from China not having yet been purged of their formal conventionalism. But the nation had turned its back finally on everything rude and archaic, and taken a long stride toward the heights of refinement it ultimately reached.

Architectural designs were obtained in the main from China. During the Nara epoch the construction of temples had chiefly occupied attention, but in the Heian era the palaces of the sovereign and the mansions of ministers and nobles were built on a scale of unprecedented grandeur. It is true that all the structures of the time had the defect of a box-like appearance. Massive, towering roofs, which impart an air of stateliness even to a wooden building and yet, by their graceful curves, avoid any suggestion of ponderosity, were still confined to