oad stairway guarded by a hoary
dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball,"
with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and
rising to the ceiling.

Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said
to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom
the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with
only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his
genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw,
but an immaterial and spiritual world as well.

CHAPTER XI
LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

"Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and
fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties
and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would
write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem
strange in words, appears very strange upon paper."

Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed
with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed,
for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various
friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland
(Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the
many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during
the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of
publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine
that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which
his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the
outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and
versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to
pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and
sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles,
his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily
intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and
a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting
considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and
thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity.

To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to
plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; b