CHAPTER XXIII. JAPANESE BUR- 

 BANKS AND MORNING-GLORIES 



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Japanese are the aesthetic nation 

 par excellence; no doubt of that. 

 With us devotion to beauty is 

 individual and exceptional; with 

 them it is national a great moral 

 force like religious devotion. Imag- 

 ine Americans getting up, as the Japanese do, 

 to attend five-o'clock garden parties to see the 

 morning-glories in all their glory! 



To be sure, there are morning-glories and 

 morning-glories. We think ours, as they climb 

 up on strings and show their red, white, and 

 blue blossoms, are pretty, and so they are. 

 To a Japanese they seem "little wild things, 

 like weeds, not beautiful or worth growing"; 

 and so think those Americans who have seen 

 the asagao, especially in their sublimated stages 

 of owa and fukurin. 



Everybody knows how much more beautiful 

 the Japanese iris and the Japanese chrysanthe- 

 mums are than any varieties of these flowers we 

 have produced. But the Japanese flower of 

 flowers is the morning-glory; not the lovely 

 thing our seedsmen sell under that name a 

 great improvement on our common varieties 

 but something infinitely more lovely, varied, 

 and ethereal; morning-glories worthy of the 

 poetic names bestowed on them, such as Frozen 

 Moonlight, Tuji's Snows, Foam of the Sea, 



