and was never able to dictate successfully.

The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would
have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float
round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding.
Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the
practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical
life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity
flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most
probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his
Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought,"
he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove
of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and
regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a
year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging,
kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then
pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and
pleased."

"You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no
two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of
each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can,
without reference to nationalities or schools."

Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the
highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his
strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole
song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and
religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people.

At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had
suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anaemia
common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things,"
as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not."
Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance.
Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it
already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he
did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead
of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain
thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency
was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly
apparition