Through this study, reading, and brooding Lafcadio Hearn's prose
ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In mere workmanship the
present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened
passages, like the final paragraph of "The Romance of the Milky Way,"
the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily
matched from any but the very greatest English prose.

In substance the volume is equally significant. In 1884 he wrote to
one of the closest of his friends that he had at last found his
feet intellectually through the reading of Herbert Spencer which
had dispelled all "isms" from his mind and left him "the vague
but omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt." And in "Ultimate
Questions," which strikes, so to say, the dominant chord of this
volume, we have an almost lyrical expression of the meaning for him of
the Spencerian philosophy and psychology. In it is his characteristic
mingling of Buddhist and Shinto thought with English and French
psychology, strains which in his work "do not simply mix well," as
he says in one of his letters, but "absolutely unite, like chemical
elements--rush together with a shock;"--and in it he strikes his
deepest note. In his steady envisagement of the horror that envelops
the stupendous universe of science, in his power to evoke and revive
old myths and superstitions, and by their glamour to cast a ghostly
light of vanished suns over the darkness of the abyss, he was the most
Lucretian of modern writers.

* * * * *

In outward appearance Hearn, the man, was in no way prepossessing. In
the sharply lined picture of him drawn by one of his Japanese comrades
in the "Atlantic" for October, 1905, he appears, "slightly corpulent