d artistic
theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though
you were passing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape.
You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round
the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical
passage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather
was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than
ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his
possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude,
others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others
dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage
the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries,
freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen.

Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him
hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance
and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of
people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other
day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan
unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there
came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and
sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty,
all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that
voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back,
and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14]

[14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he
could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having
learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson,
Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating
the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at Kumamoto
entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's
poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because
Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson
had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all
honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century,"
because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" remi