had better go, too. This dance of the
Festival of the Dead he describes in his usual graphic way: the ghostly
weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet--above all, the flitting
of the marvellous sleeves, apparitional, soundless, velvety as the
flitting of great tropical bats. In the midst of the charmed circle
there crept upon him a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted, until,
recalled to reality by a song full of sweet, clear quavering, gushing
from some girlish mouth, and fifty other voices joined in the chant.
"Melodies of Europe," he ends, "awaken within us feelings we can utter,
sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations
behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant,
totally unlike anything in western melody, impossible even to write in
those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue?

"And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be
something infinitely more old than I, something not of only one place or
time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the
universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught
spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in
some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes,--all trillings of
summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land."

CHAPTER XVI
MATSUE

"Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions
and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty
spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its
impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what
Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which
the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of
heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith
have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive."

The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue--birth-place of the
rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion--was one of the
happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career.

His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as
finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years
afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read
about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"--then he howled and
wondered