ABSTRACT
Japan has her ' magnificent distances.' To introduce you to an example of the might of some of her shapes would be to seat you for a moment on the ridge of the Otome-toge pass in the Fujiyama-Hakone country, some eighty miles south from Tokyo. From an elevation of two or three thousand feet above sealevel you may thence look northwards across, as it were, a basin, twenty miles from lip to lip. You will be conscious of a Presence, almost as men are conscious of Death coffined in the midst of them. It is Fuji. She opposes your eye as you look northwards from the Otome-toge pass, and her opposition scarcely brooks other ideas. It is fatal to them. They are commanded to be, for the time being, dead. This mountain typifies physical Japan ; it has mass, which is power ; and form, which is grace. The grace has been known ; the power has scarcely been interpreted* Fuji is 12,300 odd feet high. This is its mass, its power. For its form, as you see it from your perch in the pass, it seems absurd to regard it as an accident of Nature, so you think and speak of the mountain as a work of Art from the hand of Nature. You will find, if you care, that the country folk who dwell in the shadow do more than this, that they speak of * H i m ' ; as that i H e ' threw off his mists at ten o'clock this forenoon; that there was a snowstorm
chaunting of tonsured priests wanders along its aisles of immemorial cedars, as if in search of the echoes of the litanies sung here in the year One. There was the pomp of courts here in the time of our Venerable Bede. And tombs, trees, and temples remain of that time and pomp, giving us here the quality of venerable dignity, hoary antiquity. In fine, there are here landscapes and groves, meadows and hills, and temple courts which are anything but comical-anything but quaint, odd, grotesque.
