Half-fantastic this passage may very well be, but none the less it is the faithful reflection of a temperament lacking the sane integrity of perfect health, a nature at odds with itself through many warring inheritances and subtle rebellions of the blood, yet mastered at the last in most of its human relations by a character essentially fine. The final estimation of Hearn's work is impeded by its scattered bulk, but when in the fullness of time it is finally brought together in a collected edition it will be seen to stand very high in the second class of English prose, the class of the great _prosateurs_, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Walter Pater. Had he lived longer his rank might have been higher still. He had outgrown his old decadent conception of style as separable from substance, as an end to be attained in itself, to be arrived at by miners' work in dictionaries and thesauri. His work never ceased to be conscious art, but in his very latest writing there is a perfect fusion of his vigorous imaginative thought in the melancholy music of his cadenced prose. Toward the end of his life he had dreams more ambitious even than the stylistic ambitions of his youth so amply realized. In 1895 he wrote, 'I really think I have stored away in me somewhere powers larger than any I have yet been able to use. Of course I don't mean that I have any hidden wisdom or anything of that sort, but I believe I have some power to reach the public emotionally if conditions allow.' Still later the project is explicitly stated: 'a single short, powerful philosophical story, of the most emotional and romantic sort.' 'I feel within me,' he writes, 'the sense of such a story--vaguely, like the sense of a perfume or the smell of a spring wind which you cannot define. But the chances are that a more powerful mind than mine will catch the inspiration first, as the highest peak most quickly takes the sun.' Whether his imagination, with all its activity, had quite the creative, shaping energy ever to fulfill this dream, we shall never know. But it is certain at any rate that the last of his work, published posthumously, shows both a broadening and a deepening of what, despite the artifice of his method, we may justly call his inspiration. Had he lived to complete the imaginative autobiography of which fragments are printed in his 'Life and Letters,' it might have proved his masterpiece. The fragments have a sincere and haunting poignancy, and his prose was never more vivid and musical. For all that 'population' within him, his own intellectual and imaginative life had been marked by a unity that would doubtless have induced a corresponding unity in the book, with striking artistic results.