its glorification of friendship; for chivalry left with us at least this
one great ethical feeling, that to keep faith in friendship is a holy
thing. No wonder Amicus and Amelius were popular saints. The story implies
also, as it falls here in the book, some illustration of those unconscious
or unconsidered ethical reactions which, as we saw in the chapter on the
"Havamal," have a lasting influence on our ideals and on our conduct.

Romanticist though he was, Hearn constantly sought the romance in the
highway of life, the aspects of experience which seem to perpetuate
themselves from age to age, compelling literature to reassert them under
whatever changes of form. To one who has followed the large mass of his
lectures it is not surprising that he emphasized those ethical positions
which are likely to remain constant, in spite of much new philosophy, nor
that he constantly recurred to such books as Cory's "Ionica," or Lang's
translation of Theocritus, in which he found statements of enduring human
attitudes. To him the Greek mind made a double appeal. Not only did it
represent to him the best that has yet been thought or said in the world,
but by its fineness and its maturity it seemed kindred to the spirit he
found in ancient Japan. Lecturing to Japanese students on Greek poetry as
it filters through English paraphrases and translations, he must have felt
sometimes as we now feel in reading his lectures, that in his teaching the
long migration of the world's culture was approaching the end of the
circuit, and that the earliest apparition of the East known to most of us
was once more arriving at its starting place, mystery returning to
mystery, and its path at all points mysterious if we rightly observe the
miracle of the human spirit.