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When speaking of the fine and durable masonry, reference was had to the lofty inclosing walls, causeways, and steps which lead up to the broad ground and tombs at Nikko. We took passage from Yokohama for Kobé in the English mail steamship Sumatra, of the P. and O. line, which, after two days' pleasant voyage, landed us at the northern entrance to the Inland Sea of Japan.
It seems, according to the legend, that, while this artist was working at the ornamentation of the temples at Nikko, he saw and fell in love with a very beautiful Japanese girl resident in the city; but she would have nothing to do with him on account of his deformity of person.
TOKIO, April 30th: Leaving Nikko, with an altitude of two thousand feet higher than the sea, for Tokio, one hundred miles distant and at sea-level, was a decided drop.
The sacred temples of Nikko are in their way quite unequaled in the world, having, with other remarkable attractions, the consecrating influence of great antiquity. The oldest Japanese bronzes are valued at their weight in gold; indeed, that precious metal forms a large percentage of the material of which they are composed.
Eight miles further on is situated Yunoto village and the lake which bears the same name and is celebrated for its hot springs. This place is said to be as attractive as Lake Chuzenji. We left Nikko on an early morning train with a strong desire some day to return and make a more protracted stay.
For all along the high road from Nikko to the capital, following its every bend and turning, runs a ditch or channel filled with water. Sometimes the water is clean and rushing, sometimes foul and stagnant and evil smelling. And all the way along the high road people are bathing in this ditch or channel, in the foul or running water, as it happens.
In 1872 universal service was introduced, and French and German officers were invited to organise the defensive force. Now Japan is so strong that no Great Power in the world cares to measure its strength with it. From Tokio we travel northwards by train in two hours to Nikko. There are several villages, and we put up in one of them.
Mate, you would have to see Nikko, with its majestic cryptomarias, sheltering the red and gold lacquer temples; you would have to feel the mystery of the gray-green avenues, and have its holy silences fall like a benediction upon a restless spirit, to realize what healing for soul and body is in the very air, to understand why I joyfully loitered for two hours and came back sane and hungry, but wet as a fish.
In the religious instinct which led the Buddhists to build, at such enormous expense of time and money, those cave temples of Elephanta, Ellora, and Carlee; in the idolatrous Hindoo temples of Madura, Tanjore, and Trichinopoly, the shrines of Ceylon, the pagodas of China, and the rich temples of Nikko, one detects an underlying and elevating sentiment, a grand and reverential idea, in which there may be more of truth and acceptable veneration than we can appreciate; but in the pyramids we have no expression of devotion; only an embodiment of personal vanity, which hesitated at nothing for its gratification, and which has only proved a total failure.
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