Outposts of Asia

By MORILLA MARIA NORTON Author of Songs of the Pacific A Kingdom of the Sea Verses from the Orient Gloria Victis
THE MAGNET PUBLISHING CO. MANILA, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
COPYRIGHT, 1909 MORILLA MARIA NORTON MANILA, PHILIPPINES
To M. B. N.
Great Mother, dead but living, Living but dead, The snow falls fast, In this death month of all the year. White flakes like messengers Sent upon the blast, From Heaven to light upon thy bier. Like this death month of Nature Such thou wert and art; Cold with unsullied purity of will, White with the soul’s austerity of charity, Yet holding all the flames Of summer’s glory in thy heart.
Yokohama January 7, 1909
In writing this book of a journey through Manchuria, Korea and Japan, it is partly a tribute to the hospitality of the Imperial Railway through whose kindness I made the picturesque tour on the track of the fighting line across countries on which so much attention has been focused in these last years, partly to fulfill a pledge made to the Manila Merchants Association, to write in a book of travel through Russia a chapter on Manila, which chapter is the last in the volume.
Among the few treasures which the traveler feels he must carry away from that land of art—Japan—the writer chose a kakemono representing the grim old fighter Ieyasu dressed in his stiff brocade of choice pattern which the elegance of his life demanded.
He sits not on horse, nor in palanquin, but at ease and in reflective mood in his home, his queer head-dress arching out from his falcon-like head, holding in one hand a sword even in this hour of leisure, ready to spring upon his country’s foes, in the other hand a roll of paper, for he was like the great Charlemagne, a man of letters, as well as of battles.
Sensitive, fine and piercing as a blade, is his glance, delicate as a woman in the finish of his attitude, yet commanding, imperious, indomitable and over all and through all, a scholar, not in the infinitesimal detail of the school, but in the magnificent sense of life, one who learns from all experience and progresses through everything and acquires in every phase of fortune and misfortune, leaving to the world the priceless inheritance of such scholarship, hope, faith—nay, charity! What Ieyasu was, so to me seems his race, imbued with the large serenity which grasps ages, not minutes; it can conquer, or be conquered, with equal grace, without self-elation, or self-abasement, but with the majestic nature of the true theist and the true altruist advances to its destiny reaching as does all greatness its maturity slowly, until it becomes the master of itself and of others.