ripeness for publication. It is worth noting, however, that perfect as
is the writing of "Ultimate Questions," and complete as the essay is
in itself, the author regarded it as unfinished, and, had he lived,
would have revised and amplified some portions of it.

But if this volume lacks the incomparably exquisite touch of its
author in its arrangement and revision, it does, nevertheless, present
him in all of his most characteristic veins, and it is in respect both
to style and to substance perhaps the most mature and significant of
his works.

In his first days as a writer Hearn had conceived an ideal of his art
as specific as it was ambitious. Early in the eighties he wrote from
New Orleans in an unpublished letter to the Rev. Wayland D. Ball
of Washington: "The lovers of antique loveliness are proving to me
the future possibilities of a long cherished dream,--the English
realization of a Latin style, modeled upon foreign masters, and
rendered even more forcible by that element of _strength_ which
is the characteristic of Northern tongues. This no man can hope
to accomplish, but even a translator may carry his stones to the
master-masons of a new architecture of language." In the realization
of his ideal Hearn took unremitting pains. He gave a minute and
analytical study to the writings of such masters of style as Flaubert
and Gautier, and he chose his miscellaneous reading with a peculiar
care. He wrote again to the same friend: "I never read a book which
does not powerfully impress the imagination; but whatever contains
novel, curious, potent imagery I always read, no matter what
the subject. When the soil of fancy is really well enriched
with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow
spontaneously." Finally, to the hard study of technique, to vast