nati. Soon he rose to
be an editorial writer, and went in the course of a few years to New
Orleans to join the editorial staff of the "Times-Democrat." Here he
lived until 1887, writing odd fantasies and arabesques for his paper,
contributing articles and sketches to the magazines, and publishing
several curious little books, among them his "Stray Leaves from
Strange Literature," and his translations from Gautier. In the winter
of 1887 he began his pilgrimages to exotic countries, being, as
he wrote to a friend, "a small literary bee in search of inspiring
honey." After a couple of years, spent chiefly in the French West
Indies, with periods of literary work in New York, he went in 1890
to Japan to prepare a series of articles for a magazine. Here through
some deep affinity of mood with the marvelous people of that country
he seems suddenly to have felt himself at last at home. He married a
Japanese woman; he acquired Japanese citizenship in order to preserve
the succession of his property to his family there; he became a
lecturer in the Imperial University at T[=o]ky[=o]; and in a series
of remarkable books he made himself the interpreter to the Western
World of the very spirit of Japanese life and art. He died there of
paralysis of the heart on the 26th of September, 1904.

* * * * *

With the exception of a body of familiar letters now in process of
collection, the present volume contains all of Hearn's writing that
he left uncollected in the magazines or in manuscript of a sufficient
ripeness for publication. It is worth noting, however, that perfect as
is the writing of "Ultimate Questions," and complete as the essay is
in itself, the author regarded it as unfinished, and, had he lived,
would have revised and amplified some portions of it.

But if this volume lacks the incomparably exquisite touch of its
author in its arrangement and revision, it does, nevertheless, present
him in all of his most characteristic veins, and it is in respect both
to style and to substance perhaps the most mature and significant of
his works.

In his first days as a writer Hearn had conceived an ideal of his art
as specific as it was ambitious. Early in the eighties he wrote from
New Orleans in an unpublished letter to the Rev. Wayland D. Ball
of Washington: "The lovers of antique loveliness are proving to me
the future possibilities of a long cherished dream,--the English
realization of a Latin styl