ften invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the
psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive
recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that
the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to
spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self,
lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most
efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power.

Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then,
as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or
when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of
rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the
body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight
and acute dyspepsia.

Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from
communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he
possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in
silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and
aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel.

Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and
misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he
showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and
sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external
influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If
those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him
forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse
himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections.

After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in
front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of
achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you
are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic
material?

Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that
literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling,
as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance,
that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that
the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient
sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exact