ll the weakness and none of the strength of the French
Impressionist school.

The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the
unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of
continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate
every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by
Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems.

A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love,
yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his
lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb
the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the
litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that
which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor
Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of
music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and
the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And
at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by
his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient
place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle
of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she,
unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away
forever.

Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a
period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The
problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron.
Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who
preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence,
dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his
idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not
obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself
in the mediocrity to which she belonged.

Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland
had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange
old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness,
and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where
she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a
grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought,
_une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could gi