The integrity of Hearn's intellectual life consisted in his strangely single-hearted devotion to both artistic beauty and scientific truth. And precisely in this, I believe, lies the significance of his work. He was, in a certain sense, the most Lucretian of modern writers. It has been said that, as Spinoza was 'a man drunk with God,' so Lucretius was 'a man drunk with natural law.' Well, Hearn was a man drunk with Herbert Spencer, and in all save the accident of form he was the poet of Spencerian evolution. As Lucretius, preaching his tremendous doctrine of the monstrous, eternal rain of atoms through the world, wove into his great poem the beauty of the old mythology, the tragedy of passionate humanity, so Hearn, in his gentler fashion, steadily envisaged the horror that envelops the stupendous universe of modern science, and by evoking and reviving ancient myths and immemorial longings, cast over the darkness a ghostly light of vanished suns. In the final paragraph of his 'Romance of the Milky Way,'--the River Celestial along which, in Japanese mythology, the spirits of the dead return to meet their loves beneath the moon,--we have the heart of Lafcadio Hearn:-- 'Perhaps the legend of Tanabata, as it was understood by those old poets, can make but a faint appeal to Western minds. Nevertheless, in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the scintillant sky,--to make me forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanagowa itself,--the River Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the winds of autumn. White Orihim? I see at her starry loom, and the Ox that grazes on the farther shore; and I know that the falling dew is the spray from the Herdsman's oar. And the heaven seems very near and warm and human; and the silence about me is filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal,--forever yearning and forever young, and forever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the gods.' If, as some hold, the problem of modern romantic literary art has been to portray the human spirit caught in a magic web of necessity, 'penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves'; to marry strangeness with beauty; to accomplish all this in a style as express and gleaming as goldsmith's work; then few writers have solved it more brilliantly than Lafcadio Hearn. EPHEMERÆ. FLORIDIAN REVERIES TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH _May_ 2, 188-