An Artist's Letters from Japan

This impressionable race found, contrasting with and supporting its nature, secure, steady, undeviating guides, so that these foreign ideals have persisted here with a transplan...

This may be strange and contradictory to the modern Western mind, gradually accustomed to polished cartoons for bad paintings and worse glass, to remarkable designs for decorati...

But it is late: we look again upon Kioto from the temple above, all swimming in light and haze, and walk back to our _kurumas_, a final good-by to the children, but we shall see...

No painter ever saw a more ideal light. And suddenly it faded, leaving us in a still brilliant twilight, through which we looked at the tossing of the hazy sea. The mast was lif...

As I said before, the story as I have just told it has been kept in memory, if not invented on purpose, through a book written in honor of a Japanese opposed to Honda, the maste...

As you see, the Mikado has been the fountain of honor for this world and the next; and I cannot help being reminded of the constant relations of Chinese and Japanese thought in...

However piercing the observation of actual fact, its record is always a synthesis. I remember many years ago looking over some Japanese drawings of hawking with two other youngs...

The heat was still intense even in the night, within fifty yards of the sea; we went down to the quay and hired a boat with man and boy, to drift out into the hazy moonlight. Th...

Or, while we are thinking of heads cut off, I pass again and again a lofty monument, under great trees, on a wide avenue beautifully macadamized, and kept in the trim of our Cen...

I am writing these vagaries by the sound of the waterfall in our garden; half of the _amados_ are closed; the paper screens near me I have left open, and the moths and insects o...

The Doctor took us on Sunday afternoon to his club--whose name I think means the perfume of the maple--to see and to listen to some Japanese plays which are given in the club th...

You know the story probably; at any rate, you will find it in Mitford's tales of old Japan. It is a beautiful story, full of noble details, telling how, by the mean contrivance...

Now the road became heavy, wet, and full of deep ruts, and our miserable ponies came to a standstill--and balked. The Japanese mildness of our driver disappeared. He took to bea...

As we rode we passed beneath plantations covered with water, so that their mirror, at the level of the eye, reflected the mountains and clouds and upper sky in a transparent pic...

Here the artist does not walk attired in all the heavy armor which we have gradually accumulated upon us. His learning in side issues is not unnecessarily obtruded upon me, so a...

We leaned against the stone rails and talked of Iyéyasŭ--of his good nature, of his habit of chatting after battle, of his fraudulent pretensions to great descent; and of the de...

_My Dear Adams:_ Without you I should not have seen the place, without you I should not have seen the things of which these notes are impressions. If anything worth repeating ha...

Of course the descendant of a princely house needs not to go deeply into the studies of a scientific education. It is sufficient that he be made acquainted by professional men w...