The Beauties of Nikkô—The Burial of lyéyasu—The Approach to the Great Shrines — The Yomei Gate—Gorgeous Decorations— Simplicity of the Mausoleum—The Shrine of lyémitsu—Religious Art of Japan and India—An Earthquake—Beauties of Wood-carving.

Kanaya's NikkÔ, June 21.

I HAVE been at Nikkô for nine days, and am therefore entitled to use the word “Kek’ko !”

Nikkô means “sunny splendor,” and its beauties are celebrated in poetry and art all over Japan. Mountains for a great part, of the year clothed or patched with snow, piled in great ranges round Nantaizan, their monarch, worshipped as a god; forests of magnificent, timber; ravines and passes scarcely explored; dark green lakes sleeping in endless serenity; the deep abyss of kêgon, into which the waters of Chiuzenjii plunge from a height, of 250 feet; the bright, beauty of the falls of Kiri Furi, the loveliness of the gardens of Dainichido; the sombre grandeur of the passes through which the Daiyagawa forces its way from the upper regions; a gorgeousness of azaleas and magnolias ; and a luxuriousness of vegetation perhaps unequalled in Japan, are only a few of the attractions which surround the shrines of the two greatest Shôguns.

To a glorious resting-place on the hill-slope of Hotoké Iwa, sacred since 767, when a Buddhist, saint, called Shôdô Shônin, visited it, and declared the old Shinto deity of the mountain to be only a manifestation of Buddha, Hidetada, the second Shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty, conveyed the corpse of his father, lyeyasu, in 1617.9 It was a splendid burial. An Imperial envoy, a priest, of the Mikado's family, court, nobles from Kiyôto, and hundreds of daimiyôs, captains, and nobles of inferior rank, took part in the ceremony. An army of priests in rich robes during three days intoned a sacred classic 10,000 times, and lyeyasu was deified by a decree of the Mikado under a name signifying “light of the east, great incarnation of Buddha.” The less important Shoguns of the line of Tokugawa are buried in Uyeno and Shiba, in Yedo.