Japanese Temple Gardens 
farther left-hand corner, you come upon a 
very different scene. Here everything is 
wildly picturesque, though still on a tiny 
scale. The monastic buildings wander off at 
all angles until they are brought up standing, 
against the wall of a beetling hill from which 
the trees lean 
down, thrusting 
their twisted 
branches out over 
the ti led roofs 
with their long 
keen curves. 
From under the 
very temple, it 
seems, springs a 
minute mountain 
torrent, threading 
its way through 
the midst of the 
garden at the 
bottom of a Lilli¬ 
putian crevasse. 
Toy stone bridges 
are flung across 
it, little trees, 
twisted into most 
impossible curves and angles, jut from its 
banks, velvety box runs along the mossy 
stone embankment, and strange little wild 
flowers seek the edge of the water. There 
are bronze lanterns and vases also, and on 
the farther side, the moss-blackened grave¬ 
stones begin and lead one away over the flat 
stepping stones to the hill base, then up the 
slope where the whole forest is full of similar 
memorials of the dead. 
Phis kdshoji is full of some kind of en¬ 
chantment; once there one would never leave. 
We had heard each evening down at our inn 
at Uji (our inn that was built far back in the 
days of Hydeoshi) the velvety boom of some 
enormous bell, a sound that seemed to draw 
one irresistibly, 
to rise up in the 
still night and 
search for its 
source under the 
great pale moon. 
In Koshoji we 
found the bell, 
and much more; 
a little oasis in the 
desert of steam 
trams, and beer, 
and liberal poli¬ 
tics, and we 
wanted to stay 
there forever. 
Theold japan has 
this charm, and I 
think this same 
charm concen¬ 
trates itself, and 
becomes really quite irresistible, in the form 
of a scented temple garden in some forgotten 
monastery, where the odour of incense min¬ 
gles with that of box, where the patterned 
sand retains the lines of a thousand years 
ago, where tonsured bonzes in yellow robes 
move silently through the shed petals of a 
pink cherry, and a thunderous bell gives 
tongue at the rising of the moon. 
Ralph Adams Cram. 
90 
