The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of the past, to break which were impious as well as sad.

The golden age, that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the lands where it is always morning, and where man has never passed to his prosaic noon.

Befitting the place is the mind we find there.

As its language so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal state to which we all awake first before we become aware of that something we later know so well as self.
Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is their own.
Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous.

Half of the present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism has kept the other half pure.