s in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude
of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into
the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library,
weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his
work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the
rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent
scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down,
while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with
uplifted hand and enigmatic smile.

Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from
memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and
realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his
curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his
house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath
his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his
wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of
Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky
and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac
spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natale_, the
flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the
growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey
sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir
under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs,
that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and
the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu.

Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the
social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have
Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers'
ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's
incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by
any of our English essayists.

Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems
suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After
some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies
when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on
the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained
after years of hard work, he was enabled to c