sionately admired that quality in others wherein he felt himself
wanting. He was generous to others, not to himself. It is unfortunate
that he studied the prose of the seventeenth century. Mr. Krehbiel
evidently knew of his tone-deafness. Hearn wrote him that he could
listen to Patti after he had read Krehbiel. This proves him to be of
the "literary" type of music lover; music must first be a picture
before it makes a tonal image in the cortical cells. The most
remarkable thing in the Hearn case is his intensity of vision without
adequate optical organs. With infinite pains he pictured life
microscopically. He was for ever excited, his brain clamouring for
food, starving for the substance denied it by lack of normal eyesight.
Hearn sickened of newspaper work, he loathed it, he often declared,
and slipped away to New Orleans. There he found much material for his
exotic cravings. He accumulated an expensive and curious library, for
his was the type of talent that must derive from art, not life. At
Martinique we find him hypnotised by the scenery, the climate, and the
colourful life. He abhorred the cold, he always shivered in New York,
and this tepid, romantic island, with its dreamy days and starry
nights, filled him with languid joy. But he soon discovered that the
making of literature was not possible in such a luxurious atmosphere,
as he did later in Japan, and he returned to the United States. In
1890 he left for the East, never to return. He died at Tokio,
September 26, 1904.

Hearn had an amazing acquaintance with the folk-lore of many nations.
He was perpetually raving over the Finnish, the Voodoo, the Hindu. If
he had gone to Paris instead of to Japan, we should have missed the
impressionism of his Japanese tales, yet he might have found the
artistic solace his aching heart desired. There his style would have
been better grounded; there he would have found solid weapons
fashioned for his ethnical, archaeological, and aesthetical excursions.
Folk-lore is a treacherous byway of literature, and Hearn always
worked in it with old-fashioned tools. As versatile in range as were
his researches, the results are meagre, for he was not a trained
observer nor thinker in any domain. So is it that in his later rovings
among the metaphysics of Spencer and modern thought there is something
feverishly shallow. His judgments of English writers were amateurish.
He called Kipling a great poet, presumably on the strength of his
exo