Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/35

Rh I should like to know where is a more beautiful, sweeter way than that to see or read the picture or poem. Great is the art of those old tea-masters who were the real poets of action.

There is the garden path called roji, so to say, the passage into self-illumination, leading from the without to the within, that is to say, the tea-house under the world-wearied grayness of age-unknown trees, by the solitary granite lanterns, solitary like a saint or a philosopher with the beacon light in heart; it is here that you have to forget the tumultuous seas of the world on which you must ride and play at moral equilibrium, and slowly enter into the teaism or the joy of aestheticism. Now I should like to know if our lives are not one long roji where, if you are wiser, you will attempt to create the effects or atmosphere of serenity or poetry by the mystery of silence. There are many great tea-masters who have left us words of suggestion how to beguile and lead our minds from the dusts and ruin of life into the real roji mood that is the blessing of shadowy dreams and mellow, sweet unconsciousness of soul's freedom; I agree at once with Rikiu who found his own secret in the following old song:

I turned my face not to see Flowers or leaves; 'Tis the autumn eve With the falling light: How solitary the cottage stands By the sea!"