dary line between meum and
tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and
epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The
Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The
subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken
from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue,"
probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of
small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own
characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul
of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he
went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses
of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet
Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on Japan, afterwards published
in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by
Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling.

As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously
exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to
admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori,
all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession
of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper
significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He
endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the
emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his
genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations
and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at
times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk
surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain
coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms,
and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the
wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the
talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent
circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the
cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism.

Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that
they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of
the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his
outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be