I have already mentioned how the _hokku_ form of verse arose as a moral influence, how literary composition is always recommended as the best medicine for sorrow; but what of a nation whose gardens are arranged to express an ethical abstraction such as courage, resignation, obedience, or to suggest a saying of Buddha, the Blessed One; whose dwarf trees are not merely grown to make a design, but also to express an idea and suggest a reflection; where every single tree, and flower, and bird, and beast is a moral symbol and is commonly used as such; where a simple candlestick of a stork standing on a tortoise and holding the stem of a convolvulus in its mouth is a whole philosophy: the stork, representing Life, standing upon the tortoise, Eternity, and holding in its mouth the Morning Glory, a flower whose brief life, only blooming for the few hours after dawn, is typical of mortality, and the impermanence of all things. From Life based upon Eternity springs Mortality, whose joys are fleeting. Here is the kernel of the whole Buddhistic faith. The impermanence of phenomena and the eternity of law, that is, cause and effect. Even such an ordinary art as that of arranging flowers is deeply ethical. The whole of Chinese philosophy is bound up with it. Each stem is known by the name of some tenet in this philosophy, and at the end of the lesson on flower arrangement the teacher sits down and talks to the class of the underlying ethical ideas. I do not think there is any art in the world into which so much thought and meaning has been poured as into that of the Japanese. Every design, even the simplest, even the most stereotyped, has behind it a whole world of symbol, of suggestion which speaks to the mind of the beholder as the outlines to his eye. And this is the reason why no design is ever unmeaning, haphazard, as it so often is with us. It is there not only because it is beautiful, but because it is appropriate to the place and the occasion, because it has some connection with the object it decorates, with the person who gives or the person who receives it, with the time and the circumstances of the giving. Their art, in fact, regarded from the ethical point of view, is often a sort of moral shorthand, a very beautiful, finely wrought shorthand, which men can take away and think upon.