of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there
never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the
utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the
myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar
even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no
doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of
pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may
revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual
being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of
generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the
darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest
moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7]

[7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock.

It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England
in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the
wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the
future.

Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in
every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and
the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at
Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his
fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his
candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of
art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in
writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in
dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of
October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers,
called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to
lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of
sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The
_Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published
in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of
Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the
intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to
Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first
time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans,
and _kakemonos_