As I close this chapter I recall Yanagi's library, in the service of which, bettering Mark Pattison's example, two-thirds of its owner's income was for some time expended. I remember the thatched dwelling overlooking the quiet reed-bound lagoon with its frosty sunrises, red moonrises and apparitions of Fuji above the clouds seventy miles away. No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets West in harmony. I have made note of his Western books but not of the classics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown. I have not mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism to Japan; severe little gilt-bronze figures of deities from China, a little older; pottery figures of exquisite beauty from the tombs of Tang, a little later; Sung pottery, a dynasty farther on; Korai celadons from Korean tombs of the same epoch; and whites and blue and whites of Ming and Korean Richo. On the wall a black and yellow tiger is "burning bright" on a strip of blood-red silk tapestry woven on a Chinese loom for a Taoist priest 500 years ago. Cimabue's portrait of St. Francis breathes over Yanagi's writing desk from one side, while from the other Blake's amazing life mask looks down "with its Egyptian power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism." These are Yanagi's silent friends. His less quiet friends of the flesh have felt that this room was a sanctuary and Yanagi a priest of eternal things, but a priest without priestcraft, a priest living joyously in the world. Above his desk is inscribed the line of Blake: Thou also, dwellest in eternity and Kepler's aspiration, "My wish is that I may perceive God whom I find everywhere in the external world in like manner within and without me." FOOTNOTES: [107] One of the reasons assigned for the suicide of the General was thoughts of his responsibility for the terrible slaughter in the assaults on Port Arthur. [108] Mrs. Yanagi is one of the best contraltos heard at the now numerous Japanese concerts of Western music. [109] _Shinjū_, or suicide for love, the girl often being a geisha, is common. [110] "I am inclined to think," wrote Yanagi in 1921, in a paper on Korean art, "that we have paid if anything rather too much attention to European works while making little effort to pay attention to what lies much nearer to us." [111] POLICE STANDARDS.--The sale of one issue of the magazine was prohibited by the police, who found a nude "antagonistic to the ordinary standard of public morals." The editors' answer next month--the police standard being, "No front views"--was to publish half a dozen more nudes with their backs to the reader.