Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/55

Rh mark!) spirit of this mechanical, boiler-hammering, railway-laying, factory-building age cannot wholly wrest from them their inheritance. From history to prophecy: if ever it should, then the day that Japan ceases to love her gentle-spirited gardens, and to rejoice in their peace and their healing restfulness to the soul, that day also will she lose her love for children and youth; she will lose her pity and her kindliness, her art and her poetry, and with them her wonderful patriotism, her fearless courage, her strength and power in war, her steadfast devotion and self-sacrifice. She will lose all, in a word, that makes her not only greatest in the Orient, but one of the greatest nations in the whole world; for these things are of the spirit, and when the spirit dies, the man, the nation, is doubly and eternally dead.