DETAIL OF CLOISTER WALLS, INNER COURT.
White and gold shine in the great brackets and the recesses of the rafters. Below the white frieze, carved with many small figures of Chinese story, the pillars and the lintel are inlaid in many carved woods, ornaments of dragons, plants, and diapered patterns on the whitened ground. The opened doors repeat the same faint tones of wood, and of white and gold, and of gilded metals. The walls, which are open at the base, are merely lattice screens. Their exquisite flowered patterns fluctuate with gilded accents of whites, greens, lavenders, and blues.
LINTEL, BRACKET CAPITAL.
The gate inside is, therefore, nothing but an ornamented trellis, made still lighter by contrast with the solid white doors, trellised at top, but whose lower panels are exquisitely embellished with inlaid carved woods and chiseled golden metal. We took off our shoes, and ascended the bronze-covered steps of the oratory and shrine, which come down from the red-lacquered veranda, behind the four carved white pillars of the descending porch. Great white dragons with spiky claws project from the pillars, and crawl in and out of the double transom. In the shadow of the roof golden monsters hang from the complex brackets. The friezes and bands of the temple face are filled with carving, delicate as embossed tapestry, while the panels, deeply cut into auspicious forms of birds and flowers, carry full color and gold far up into the golden rafters.
INSIDE THE "CAT GATE"—GATE TO THE TOMB.
All recesses and openings are filled with half-realities, as if to suggest a dread or a delicious interior, as flowers might pass through palings, or great beasts, types of power, might show great limbs through confining barriers. The long building, indeed, is a great framework, strongly marked, dropped on a solid base, and weighted down by a heavy roofing. The white pillars or posts which divide its face and corners stand clear between the black-and-gold latticed screens, partly lifted, which make almost all its wall.
Strips of the sacramental white paper hang from the lower lintel against the golden shade of the interior. Inside, pale mats cover the black-lacquer floor. Exquisite plain gold pillars, recalling Egyptian shapes, divide the gilded central walls. Here and there on the gilded tie-beams curved lines of emerald-green or crimson, like tendrils, mark with exquisite sobriety a few chamfered cuttings. On either side of the long room (fifty feet) are two recesses with large gold panels on which symbolic forms are freely sketched, and carved inlays of emblematic birds fill their farthest walls. Their ceilings are carved, inlaid, and painted with imperial flowers, mystic birds, and flying figures, and the pervading crest of the Tokugawa. For these were the waiting-rooms of the family, and, as A—— remarked, the impression is that of a princess's exquisite apartment, as if the Tartar tent had grown into greater fixity, and had been touched by a fairy's wand.
All was bare except for an occasional sacred mirror, or hanging gilded ornament, or the hanging papers of the native worship; and this absence of the Buddhist images and implements of worship left clear and distinct the sense of a personal residence—the residence of a divinized spirit, not unlike the one that he was used to in life.