Hearn has tried by such rather clumsy means to arouse in his reader the specific feeling-attitude in which he wrote. He tries to do the same thing, on a more minute scale, by his system of punctuation; and the net outward result is an unpleasant spottiness of page. Let us, however, keep to the internal; and let us consider only the paragraphing. If you pause to think of it, the paragraph-feeling itself is a somewhat subtle thing; a properly rounded paragraph gives you a feeling of temporary completeness, while yet it invites you to look ahead, leaves you in a certain suspense; a poorly finished paragraph gives you the same feeling of disappointment, of being ‘taken in,’ that you get from a weak ending to a stanza, or from a musical progression that fails to hold its tone-colour. The paragraph that is set off from what follows by a blank line rouses a feeling of greater completeness; you are to stop and take breath, to let your thought play backward a little before you go on; still you are to look forward. The paragraph that begins with a dash opens up the subject from a new angle; you are to hold what you have read, but you are now to see it in a fresh light; the feeling is that of a pleasurable curiosity, with the prospect of reference forth and back. The paragraphs with asterisks between them are like different roads of survey in a country that you are touring; each one is complete in itself, but you are to remember them all for a future synthesis; at the moment you have a sense of relief, but this is mixed with a somewhat exciting responsibility; the author expects you to be ready for him when he comes to summarising. Lastly, the train of periods means a trail of feeling; the device, which is far more freely used by French than by English writers, invites you to let your thought play ahead a little, in the context of the feeling aroused by the paragraph, before you go on. Take the description of the local Shint[=o] festival: “By immemorial custom the upper stories of all the dwellings had been tightly closed: woe to the Peeping Tom who should be detected, on such a day, in the impious act of _looking down upon the god_!...” Elementary enough, in all conscience; and needlessly emphasised by the italics; and yet tremendously effective; one’s ideas trail off, in a context of feeling, from the seacoast village of Japan to the inland English town, from outraged godhead to the desecration of humanity; not sentimentally, or one has missed the writer’s intention, but in a continuous train of attitudes which derive from literary sentiment. It is a pity, psychologically, that ‘sentimental’ is the adjective of ‘sentimentality’; for sentimentality is at the opposite pole to sentiment, as sentiment is here used; but we cannot help the twists of language.