Thus I explain the aerial character of its foliage, fragmentarily suspended. As the pine lends the irregular outline of its boughs to the lines of the harmonious landscape, better to enhance the charm and the brilliancy of Nature, it also spreads everywhere the shadow of its singular tufts; over the power and the glory of Ocean, blue in the sun; over the harvest fields; and obstructing the design of the constellations or the dawn upon the sky. It sweeps its branches beneath azalea bushes flaming near the surface of lakes blue as gentian, or above the steep embankments of the imperial city, close to the silver, grass-grown waters of the canals; and the evening on which I saw Fuji like a colossus, like a virgin throned in the clarity of the Infinite, the dark tuft of a pine was silhouetted against the dove-colored mountain. THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST When I left Yeddo the great sun was flaming in the clear sky. Toward the end of the afternoon, arriving at the junction of Utsonomiya, I perceive that a shadow has darkened all the sunset. Composed of huge, heaped-up clouds, it presents that tumultuous and chaotic aspect that a sky sometimes shows when, like the veiled fire of footlights, a gleaming streak on the horizon throws long shadows across the dim fields, bringing out each object in clear relief. Drowsing on the wharf just now, and for a long time in the train moving westward, I have been a spectator of the decline of day and the gradual deepening of darkness. With one glance I have caught the whole plan of the country. In the background, deep forests and the folds of cumbrous mountains; in the foreground, detached footpaths which bar the way, one behind the other, like spaced and parallel barriers. Where the trenches we follow show us a cross-section of the earth, we see first a fine mold, black as coal; then yellow sand; and finally clay, red with sulphur or cinnabar. Avernus spreads out before us! Does not this scorching sun, this low sky, this surrounding harshness of volcanoes and fir-trees, correspond to that black abyss from which the visions of dreams arise? Indeed it was with a royal wisdom that the ancient shogun, Ieyasu, chose this place for his disembodied spirit to enter the kingdom of shades, and, by dissolving in silence into their shadows, transmute death into godhead as a temple is created of a tomb. The forest of cryptomeria is truly a temple. Often before, at this hour of somber twilight, I had crossed the double avenue of these giant trees,--which extends twenty leagues to conduct from the red bridge the annual ambassador who bears Imperial presents to this ancestral shrine,--but this morning, at the hour when the first rays of the sun turned the banks of somber verdure above me to rose color in the golden wind which swept them, I penetrated into the colossal nave, deliciously filled with a resinous odor, after the cold night.