An Artist's Letters from Japan

by John La Farge

The temple of Iyémitsŭ is, indeed, charming and of feminine beauty, complete, fitted into the shape of the mountain like jewels in a setting. From near the red pagoda of Iyéyasŭ's grounds a wide avenue leads, all in shade, to an opening, narrowed up at its end to a wall and gate, which merely seem a natural entrance between the hills. There are great walls to the avenue, which are embankments of the mountains. From them at intervals fountains splash into the torrents at each side, and overhead are the great trees and their thin vault of blue shade. The first gate is the usual roofed one, red, with gilded rafters and heavy black bronze tiles, and with two red muscular giants in the niches of the sides. Its relative simplicity accentuates the loveliness of the first long court, which we enter on its narrowest side. Its borders seem all natural, made of nothing but the steep mountain sides, filled with varieties of leafage and the columns of the great cedars. These indeterminate edges give it the look of a valley shut at each end by the gate we have passed, and by another far off disguised by trees. This dell is paved in part, and with hidden care laid out with smaller trees. Down the steep hillside, a cascade trembles through emerald grass, part lost, part found again, from some place where, indistinct among the trees, the jaws of a great bronze dragon discharge its first waters. A simple trough collects one rill and sends it into the large stone cube of a tank, which it brims over and then disappears.

The little pavilion over this well is the only building in the inclosure. It is more elegant than that of Iyéyasŭ, with its twelve columns, three at each corner, sloping in more decidedly, their white stone shafts socketed in metal below and filleted with metal above, melting into the carved white architrave. In the same way the carvings and the blue and green and red and violet of the entablature melt in the reflections under the shadow of the heavy black-and-gold roof with four gables. From under the ceiling, and hanging below the lintels, flutter many colored and patterned squares of cloth, memorials of recent pilgrims.

LOOKING DOWN ON THE WATER-TANK, OR SACRED FONT, FROM THE SECOND GATE.

As we turn to the highest side of the court on the left and ascend slowly steep, high steps to a gorgeous red gate above our heads whose base we cannot see, the great cedars of the opposite side are the real monuments, and the little water-tank, upon which we now look down, seems nothing but a little altar at the foot of the mountain forest. The gate, when we look back, is only a frame, and its upper step only a balcony from which to look at the high picture of trees in shadow and sunlight across the narrow dell which we can only just feel beneath us.

The great red gate has two giant guardians of red and green, and innumerable bracketings for a cornice, all outlined, and confused all the more by stripes of red and green and white and blue.

A PRIEST OF IYÉMITSŬ.

Just behind the gate, as if it led to nothing, rises again the wall of the mountain; then we turn at right angles toward a great esplanade, lost at its edges in trees, from which again the forest would be all the picture were it not that farther back upon the hill rises a high wall, with a platform and lofty steps, and the carved red-and-gold face of a cloister, with another still richer gate of a red lacquer, whose suffering by time has made it more rosy, more flower-like.

Up these steps we went, the distant trees of the mountains ascending with us, and we rested in the red-and-gold shade. Above us the gold brackets of the roof were reflected back, in light and dark, upon the gold architrave, adorned by the great carved peonies, red and white, and great green leaves which stood out with deep undercutting. From the fluted red columns projected great golden tapirs' heads and paws, streaked with red like the bloom of tulips. The gilded metal sockets and joinings and the faint modeled reliefs of the wall, all of dull gold, looked green against the red lacquer. Beyond, the inner lintel was green, like malachite, against the sunny green of the forest. Its chamfered edge reflected in gold the lights and shadows beyond, and against the same green trees stood out the long heads and trunks of the tapir capitals in red and gold.