eft, scorning luxury and ease,
Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one
object, his thoughts fixed on one aim.

In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a
spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of
the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy,
when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable
is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ...
her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life
and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad
generations that have arisen and passed away.

What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap
publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and
invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on
the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing
of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work
aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the
exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that
the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out.

As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the
beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things,
emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and
passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life,
making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were
beautiful to die for."

INDEX

AKIRA, 168, 170, 316.

Alma Tadema, 57.

Amenomori Nobushige, 168, 184, 235, 267.

American criticism, an, 145.

Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, 143, 144, 149.

Ancestral tablet, the, 253.

"Ants," essay on, 293.

Arnold, Matthew, 59.

Arnoux, Leopold, 154.

Asama-Yama, 144.

Atkinson, Mrs., 4, 13, 217, 301, 304, 313;
letters to, 31-48, 56, 67, 68, 86, 100, 112, 204, 221, 252;
visits Japan, 313 _et seq._

Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, 202.

Atkinson, Carleton, 4, 49.

Atkinson, Dorothy, 313, 317.

Avatars, 4.

BAKER, CONSTANCE, 334.

Baker, Page M., 106, 109, 236, 242.

Ball, Sir F., 255.

Bangor, 26.

Baudelaire, 63.

Beale, Mr. James, 256, 257.

B