Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/100

JAPAN from one hundred and seventy yards to twenty-two, and through them flowed broad sheets of water, reaching the city by cunningly planned aqueducts from a river twenty miles distant; aqueducts which, as evidence of Japanese engineering skill, unassisted by foreign science, are scarcely less remarkable than the castle itself. In this combination we have an example of the homage to the beautiful that holds every Japannese a worshipper at Nature's shrine even when he seems to rely most implicitly on his own resources of brain and muscle. Placid lakes lapping the feet of stupendous battlements; noble pines bending over their own graceful reflections in still waters; long stretches of velvety sward making a perpetual presence of rustic freshness among the dust and moil of city life; flocks of soft-plumaged wild-fowl placidly sailing in the moats or sunning themselves on the banks, careless of the tumult and din of the streets overhead; sheets of lotus-bloom glowing in the shadow of grim counterscarps—where but in Japan can be found so deliberate and so successful an effort to convert the frowns of a fortress into the smiles of a garden? This castle of the Tokugawa Regents is a portion of the alphabet by which Japanese character may be read. Hidden beneath a passion for everything graceful and refined, there is a strong yearning for the pageant of war and for the dash of deadly onset, and just as the Shōgun sought to display before the eyes 76