Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which the dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.
The other arts show the same motif in their decorations.

Pottery and lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty that it lends the maid's.

For nowhere in this world, probably, is she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short extremes, months of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks of winter in between; a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separate identity in one long self-obliterating kiss..