Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/311



HE garden and flower lore of Japan is strangely impersonal. As in her poetry, there is little of simile, or of the turning of plant life into human beings, or the endowment of personality on inanimate things. It seems as if the Japanese love flowers more for themselves than for the images they evoke, and yet what is love but a divine imagination! A man who loves his mistress for her beauty or for her character alone, who endows her not with transcendental qualities, has a narrow margin of affection on which to draw; that which is all explained is at the end of its interest. How, then, is it that the Japanese—of all the people on this earth the fondest, as a nation, of flowers—without the fairy wand of impersonation to