all my soul I prayed to prevent your going;
Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain.

"Things never changed since the Time of the Gods:
The flowing of water, the Way of Love."

His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating
this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to
Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so,
as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character.
Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant
Friendship."

* * * * *

The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this
time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific
imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of
Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life
is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and
thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my
cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of
a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define."

The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful
a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry
of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a
hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with
faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the
mighty day.

The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory
of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad
millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme
of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour
when thought itself must fade.

* * * * *

"Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated

to
Mrs. Alice von Behrens
for auld lang syne.

We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was
one of his New York acquaintances.

"Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of
this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the
Japanese poem on the first page.

To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to
do with regard to