JAPANESE GARDENS.  A GARDEN without flowers!-What an anomaly to the European whose mind has been trained to regard a garden as the special home of bright-colored blossoms, the color and perfume of which are diffused for his delectation and enjoyment! To him the flowerless gardens of Japan at first appear very sombre and severe, but eventually the mind yields to the subtle power of the aesthetic style of Japanese art, whose influence is about him in so many ways, and in none more than in the fascinating style of Japanese landscape-gardening, which		he ultimately grows to admit is decidedly purer in taste and more satisfying to the higher requirements of the mind, than our own.  A Japanese garden is especially designed to retire into-to meditate in-and is a place where perfect oblivion of the outside world is secured.  The writer can recal one such charming retreat in the very heart of the now celebrated city of Hiroshima, in the Inland Sea of Japan, a city recently all astir with the “pomp and circumstance of glorious war” but containing a garden owned by an absentee nobleman who rarely visits it, which entirely fulfils all these conditons.
前頁へ 次頁へ