I had just written the above lines about Lord Sherbrooke when, on turning over Aston’s “History of Japanese Literature” for a quite different purpose, I happened upon a quotation culled from the _Tsuré-Dzure-Gusa_ (literally “Idle blades of grass” or “_obiter dicta_”) of Kenkō, a Japanese priest who lived in the fourteenth century, so appropriate that I feel inclined to quote his words. “It is not only when we look on the moon or flowers with our eyes that they give us pleasure; but on a spring day, though we leave not the house, on a moonlight night, though we remain in our chamber, the mere thought of these cheers and delights.” Many wise, and, let me add, many pious thoughts, did the old priest who died seven hundred years ago set down in writing, and they are as good to-day as when he wrote them. Something of a _bon vivant_, too, in spite of his Buddhism, which ought to be so ascetic, was this dear old Kenkō (whose name before he entered religion was Kanéyoshi), a man with a righteous respect for a cup of good wine and the joy of sharing it with a friend. “Two things fill my spirit with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the oftener and the more constantly my thoughts are occupied with them: the star-studded heaven above me and the moral law within me.” So wrote Kant: had he seen them, he must have added as a third the giant trees of California. To me they were more impressive than any of the great phenomena of Nature that I had seen. The vastness and the appalling roar of Niagara itself did not excite in me the same awe as did these great silent witnesses of the ages. How old they might be I cared not. Their measurements left me indifferent. It was a wonder to see a great hollow tree lying on the ground, to ride in on horseback at one end and out at the other. But that was not what moved me; you cannot measure majesty, and when I saw these great sequoias towering above the pines[36] which would themselves have been Brobdingnagian anywhere else, the sense of majesty was almost oppressive.