Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/28

6 man had a poet’s heart. The nation is great which even in the souls of the common people shews such gentle and beautiful ideas.

The thing that most struck me years ago when I first went to Japan, and even after repeated visits and an intimate acquaintance with many gardens, was, “What luck, what wonderful luck, these people have! They do not need to make their gardens: Nature has done it for them. It is not that they are so artistic in composing, but only so wise in not changing a single stone or tree from the place in which it was found.” And still, after studying their methods of gardening, and knowing, from hard work on my own part, the intricacy and finesse of system that is brought to the subject by their landscape artists: after seeing a garden made—hill and stream and projecting rocks and overhanging trees, from an almost flat and perfectly bare and unwatered bit of ground—I find it hard not to think still—so natural is the result—that theirs is only the good taste which selects, not the artist mind which creates.

And so one feels that the garden had to be arranged as it was, because it would have been impossible to move the great boulders that are its backbone; that the lake and the trickling stream and the cascade must have been set there by the Divine Landscape Gardener Himself, and that the beautiful old trees had grown to that precision of shape and loveliness by the help