Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/44

18 gifts of the gods which the ordinary Japanese may bring to his garden love, he may also add the more human one of historical, or mythological (they are much the same thing to him), as well as poetical and ethical, ideas too, it is not to be wondered at that gardens are a national passion.

The priests, then (to go back to history again), ascribed imaginary religious and moral attributes to the grouping of the stones, a custom which has more or less survived to this day; and gave charming and poetic names, such as ‘Cloud-shaped Island,’ ‘Pine-bark Island,’ ‘Spouting,’ and ‘Thread-Fall,’ etc., to little islets (which, with lakes, were now considered indispensable) and to cascades. At that time there was a great insistence on the water part of a garden, whether as pond, flowing river, or leaping mountain cataract; but a little later the ‘Dried-up-Water Scenery’ came into vogue, and still remains a most popular method of indicating, if not the presence, at least the influence of water. Some of these examples are so charming and so convincing that I cannot pass them without a word or two more. Sometimes a dry cascade is formed, a rough-and-tumble torrent of grey and mossy green stones, which would almost make the observer believe that real water had but that moment ceased to fling itself headlong over them, or at least that a tiny stream still trickled there.