Then as now the people in Japan loved nature, and were quickly sensitive to her beauty and profoundly in sympathy with her varied phenomena.  In the mediaeval ages, Japanese Wordsworths are not unknown.[13] Sincerely they loved nature, and in some respects they seemed to understand the character of their country far better than the alien does or can.  Though a land of wonderful beauty, the Country of Peaceful Shores is enfolded in powers of awful destructiveness.  With the earthquake and volcano, the typhoon and the tidal wave, beauty and horror alternate with a swiftness that is amazing.

Probably in no portion of the earth are the people and the land more like each other or apparently better acquainted with each other.  Nowhere are thought and speech more reflective of the features of the landscape.  Even after ten centuries, the Japanese are, in temperament, what the Kojiki reveals them to have been in their early simplicity.  Indeed, just as the modern Frenchman, down beneath his outward environments and his habiliments cut and fitted yesterday, is intrinsically the same Gaul whom Julius Caesar described eighteen hundred years ago, so the gentleman of T[=o]ki[=o] or Ki[=o]to is, in his mental make-up, wonderfully like his ancestors described by the first Japanese Stanley, who shed the light of letters upon the night of unlettered Japan and darkest Dai Nippon.

The Kojiki reveals to us, likewise, the childlike religious ideas of the islanders.  Heaven lay, not about but above them in their infancy, yet not far away.  Although in the “Notices,” it is “the high plain of heaven,” yet it is just over their heads, and once a single pillar joined it and the earth.  Later, the idea was, that it was held up by the pillar-gods of the wind, and to them norito were recited.  “The great plain of the blue sea” and “the land of luxuriant reeds” form “the world”—­which means Japan.  The gods are only men of prowess or renown.  A kami is anything wonderful—­god or man, rock or stream, bird or snake, whatever is surprising, sensational, or phenomenal, as in the little child’s world of to-day.  There is no sharp line dividing gods from men, the natural from the supernatural, even as with the normal uneducated Japanese of to-day.  As for the kami or gods, they have all sorts of characters; some of them being rude and ill-mannered, many of them beastly and filthy, while others are noble and benevolent.  The attributes of moral purity, wisdom and holiness, cannot be, and in the original writings are not, ascribed to them; but they were strong and had power.  In so far as they had power they were called kami or gods, whether celestial or terrestrial.  Among the kami—­the one term under which they are all included—­there were heavenly bodies, mountains, rivers, trees, rocks and animals, because those also were supposed to possess force, or at least some kind of influence for good or evil.  Even peaches, as we have seen, when transformed into rocks, became gods.[14]