look at a thing--half-angered by inability to
analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think
the feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says,
'the doors have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt
in looking at that tree, was it only your pleasure, no,--many
who would have loved you, were looking through you and
remembering happier things. The different ways in which
different places and things thus make appeal would be partly
explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences
reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest.
But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness
as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then
how much dead love lives again, how many ecstasies of the
childhoods of a hundred years must revive!"

Most of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs. Brenane seems to have been
passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper Leeson Street; at Tramore, a
seaside place on the coast of Waterford in Ireland; at Linkfield Place,
Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry Molyneux, a Roman Catholic
friend of Mrs. Brenane's--destined to play a considerable part in the
boy's life--and in visiting about among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose
name was legion.

Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house,
Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have
records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his
sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio
stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea
was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now.

Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to
have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from
thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous
idea--common to most of Hearn's biographers--has originated from Hearn
himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales,
but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious
genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore
preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere.
Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions
of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's
"Wanderings in Wales."

Interpolated betwee