In this biography you may follow him through the black and coiling poverty, a mean and bitter life compared with which the career of Robert Louis Stevenson was the triumphal procession of a Prince Charming of letters. He landed finally in Cincinnati, where he secured an unimportant position on _The Enquirer_. His friends at that time were H. E. Krehbiel, Joseph Tunison, and H. F. Farney, the artist. His letters, printed in this volume, and ranging from 1877 to 1889, addressed to Mr. Krehbiel, are the most interesting for the students of Hearn the literary aspirant. He envies the solid architecture of that music-critic's prose, but realises that it is not for him--lack of structure is his chief deficiency. But he passionately admired that quality in others wherein he felt himself wanting. He was generous to others, not to himself. It is unfortunate that he studied the prose of the seventeenth century. Mr. Krehbiel evidently knew of his tone-deafness. Hearn wrote him that he could listen to Patti after he had read Krehbiel. This proves him to be of the "literary" type of music lover; music must first be a picture before it makes a tonal image in the cortical cells. The most remarkable thing in the Hearn case is his intensity of vision without adequate optical organs. With infinite pains he pictured life microscopically. He was for ever excited, his brain clamouring for food, starving for the substance denied it by lack of normal eyesight. Hearn sickened of newspaper work, he loathed it, he often declared, and slipped away to New Orleans. There he found much material for his exotic cravings. He accumulated an expensive and curious library, for his was the type of talent that must derive from art, not life. At Martinique we find him hypnotised by the scenery, the climate, and the colourful life. He abhorred the cold, he always shivered in New York, and this tepid, romantic island, with its dreamy days and starry nights, filled him with languid joy. But he soon discovered that the making of literature was not possible in such a luxurious atmosphere, as he did later in Japan, and he returned to the United States. In 1890 he left for the East, never to return. He died at Tokio, September 26, 1904.