Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/222

188 fall in with the spirit of soft melancholy which all persons of sensibility were bound to assume in the presence of maple-leaves, unless centuries of minor poetry should be coarsely disregarded. What season could be fitter for making pilgrimage to Sen-yūji, the burial-place of the Emperors? It is true that a sinister sentence in the guide-book said, "As neither the tombs nor the various treasures of the temple are shown, there is little object in visiting it." But for all we knew, the warning might be piously designed to save a sacred privacy from the more vulgar type of tourist, whose eyes are blind to immaterial things. At any rate, that was the time, if ever, to test the meaning of Murray's discreet dissuasion.

It certainly required no slight effort of imaginative sympathy to appraise at its historic worth a most paltry wooden bridge, devoid of grace or ornament, which seemed a rustic plank in comparison with the Shōgun's red-lacquer Mi Hashi at Nikkō, so finely poised and firmly flung across the foaming Daiyagawa. But that was worthy of the military usurpers, who took the substance of sovereignty and left its shadow to their nominal sovereigns, while this is only Yume no Uki-hashi, the Floating Bridge of Dreams, aptly symbolic of the recluse rois fainéants, absorbed in sentiment and moonshine. Here, we are told, as the midnight mourners bore along their dead emperor to sleep with his fathers, they would throw down a little fruit, some libatory cakes, into the whispering rivulet. Then steep and dark before them rose the narrow road, which terminates in a large hollow hewn out of the hillside to be the cradle of the sceptred heirs of the sun-goddess. Like the palaces in which they lived, their houses of death are clean and august.