To call it artistic sensibility is to use too limited a term, for it pervades the entire people; rather is it a sixth sense of a natural, because national description; for the trait differs from our corresponding feeling in degree, and especially in universality enough to merit the distinction.

Their care for tree flowers is not confined to a cultivation, it is a cult.

It approaches to a sort of natural nature-worship, an adoration in which nothing is personified.

For the emotion aroused in the Far Oriental is just as truly an emotion as it was to the Greek; but whereas the Greek personified its object, the Japanese admires that object for what it is.
To think of the cherry-tree, for instance, as a woman, would be to his mind a conception transcending even the limits of the ludicrous..