Lafcadio Hearn

"Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more, indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates-imaging sky, and land, and life-filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings-and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal peculiarities.

Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it-sun, moon, and stars-earth, sky, and sea-and mind and man, and space and time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker shapes for ever."

On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio, Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura."

The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and remarkable figures of the end of the last century.

Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.

On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock-mixture of Saxon and Celt-which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's grandfather-as has been stated-came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace, and about the same time-as recognition for services done, we conclude-became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of Westmeath.

A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County Waterford-has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev. Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship with the County Westmeath portion of the family.

As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records certainly of several Daniel Hearns-it is the Christian name that furnishes the clue-occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire and Somersetshire.

In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally "cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the Herons-pronounced Hearn-to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights."

Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'-heron with wings down-for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries, are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the various modifications of the word-namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern, Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic languages it is irren, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. Hirn, the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin errare and Frankish errant, with the Celtic err names are related, though the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or gipsies, is referred to.

I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible sign of Romany descent.

Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element-quite distinct from the Japanese type-is so strong as to have impressed itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may, on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India.

On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek; Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand, maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands. The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian, half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes, migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original Venetian Maltese.

"We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite addition-the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us, stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested themselves-the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.

From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.

Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew-"Veritable blunderers," as Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world."

Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother. I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the 'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular directions-guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a resemblance in his children by two different mothers-and I want so much to find out if the resemblance is also psychological."

Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849 infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor, additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands.

Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore, necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep; the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.

But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways. Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use.

Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress. A lock of hair was enclosed:-

"Dearest and nearest to my heart,

Thou art fairer than the silver moon,

And I trust to see thee soon."

There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with the following:-

"Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love

And evermore will beat for thee!!"

"Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.

Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo, but communication between the islands was frequent.

As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland, of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount of friction.

Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island, excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends." Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.

Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world-the world that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty-impressed itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court-his mother, presumably-chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and temples of the ancient Leucadia.... Awakening, he heard, in the night, the moaning of the real sea-the muttering of the Tide of the Returning Ghosts.

Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta. How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.

Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old. He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard. Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"-indeed, all his belongings-were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task entrusted to him.

Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript; the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a text from the Gospels and Epistles.

Because of the political and religious animus existing between Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England. All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation, thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate opinions.

On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7 o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady! Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear, beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us." Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs. Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later, in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to perfectly harmless actions and statements.

Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son, having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major portion of the capital of Ireland.

The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory. She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe castigation.

When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them. In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.

When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another time, another heaven.

Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers, after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated, with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as his own.

"My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark, with large black eyes-very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap it. I slapped it-simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences."

* * *

The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane-"Sally Brenane," Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin Brenane-a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means-and had adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak, bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband.

In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands, something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes, accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them.

Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman, when she went for her daily drive.

* * *

In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies. Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton."

The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of storm!

Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace and charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free again, and was living as a widow in Dublin.

What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary. "October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay.

An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now, whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person," Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea.

Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred feet under the dinner-table.

Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).

It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew, or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these years-the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his mother's brain.

In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety, strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says, "remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of brotherhood, I was totally indifferent-especially for the reason that he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again."

The following reminiscence requires little comment:-

"I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way. Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady came to meet us. She seemed to me tall-but a child cannot judge stature well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after."

The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time in Dublin.

Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny, odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long, lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent, myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from him.

"Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells of-the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down easily. 'Ah!' she said:-'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But how I would love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day-great huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels.

"At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now. I rather think I should like to see her."

Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life.

In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma, the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever person, beloved by her children and all her family connections, especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old." [1]

[1] "Out of the East," Gay & Hancock.

"The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister, when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him again.

"I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him by some tale told her about his life in Paris."

* * *

The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the tablets of her memory.

After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.

Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith.

Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his grand-aunt.

Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard in Paris.

Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she wished me to, and I was lazy."

Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of Indian fever, on board the English steamship Mula at Suez, thus ending a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years.

With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end. We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame, remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness-that tenderness generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the arena of life.

* * *

"You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with which we 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 between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan," [2] one of Hearn's last books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his memory, and calls them "Welsh hills."

[2] The publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China, when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend."

The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes, under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong.

Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib, his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth-

"Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..."

The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose to his eyes.

In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been eight or nine years old-I might have been twelve. And that's all."

It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday.

Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered, spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience of the artistic productions of the Far East.

One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels.

By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was, moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so as a child; I was a perfect imp."

Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief-traps arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened, the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono' (flatterer) and run away and hide myself."

He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days after, she would discover it half-rotten.

Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a lap-dog."

But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore, and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys, and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy, of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs. Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling, whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled, for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion over the Celtic mind.

Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled "Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy.

He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings, ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not "ghosts."

The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain, brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before the accident at Ushaw.

The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from eyestrain.

After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre de la Pitié et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant incidents made too important.

"Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in me-thus producing obvious incongruities."

"My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish mind by a certain cousin Jane-apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell fire if he did not believe in God.

When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later, dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were apparently uninfluenced by her religious views.

In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane, Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of those who wanted to come and go daily to London.

Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street.

When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt-we see his name assigned by the Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866-the house at Redhill was given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment.

Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance.

Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction-but was not sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an annuity of (I think, but am not sure) ￡500. 'Henry,' who had 'made himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own, as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor, but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'-at fourteen. I used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a year or two....

"Well,-there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under pressure of work, I have to say good-bye.

"Lovingly ever,

"Lafcadio Hearn."

In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if accurately known, give revelation about some other matters."

* * *

"If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers....

When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'?

"So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its own thick breath.'"

Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's.

There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's brain-perhaps after the lapse of years-of a day spent by the sea listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness, something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse, raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos, sometimes of inspiration.

Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes unconsciously, memories of these childish days.

At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo hedge-or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black beach-or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable in the touch of the wind,-or by all these-he could not say; but slowly there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams....

Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world, the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries, the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral.

The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a fragment entitled "Gulf Winds," [3] shows his inspiration at its best. Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the Commercial, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of last century.

[3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin.

"Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with sudden light. Chita, at the Viosca Chénière, conquering her terror of the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the dawn-like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; Chita learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which, the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds, darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own childish existence at Tramore.

For him, as for Chita, there was no factitious life those days, no obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without.

When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay.

Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered for his habit of "drawing the long bow."

Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was not distinguished by accuracy of statement.

The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those surrounding him-not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world. While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul entrenched itself.

Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and divine-the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it, recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came."

It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as having been found amongst his papers after his death.

His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly, stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however, exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear. Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The medi?val creed seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.

The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow; the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places, but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had been put on the gods-large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....

After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees, in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain.

A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the "Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city of artistic appreciation and accomplishment.

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