It is this group of papers, of special interest and significance to the student of Hearn,--themselves marked by the rich beginnings of his characteristic charm,--that have been selected to form the bulk of the present volume. Hearn himself at one time began to prepare for the press a collection of these papers, with the Floridian Reveries' as its initial section. Indeed, there is before me as I write a manuscript title-page done with those queer, curiously curving strokes of the pen, reading,--and bearing the striking motto from Delacroix that stands at the beginning of the present volume. Apparently it was Hearn's intention to add to the 'Floridian Reveries' a little collection of 'Fantastics,' with such savory titles as 'Aida,' 'The Devil's Carbuncle,' 'A Hemisphere in a Woman's Hair,' 'The Fool and Venus,' etc. This group, however, is, unfortunately, lost. From the notebook labeled upon its cover 'Fantastics' many leaves have been cut, and there remains only the paper on 'Arabian Women,' which appears hereafter. The Creole papers have been selected from the vast number of essays that Hearn wrote upon this subject, as showing best, perhaps, the peculiar direction of his interests. Taken as a whole, the material here offered to the reader marks the end of Hearn's first literary period, the period of translation and paraphrase, of 'literary journalism.' The year 1883, as readers of his letters know, marked an epoch in Hearn's intellectual life. Then for the first time he read Herbert Spencer, and by a singular paradox conceived a passionate adoration for that passionless philosopher who, we may think, had the peculiar advantage of knowing so much about the Unknowable.' The secret of the paradox seems to have been that Spencer's vast synthetic panorama of the universe, outer and inner, was precisely the kind of vision to attract Hearn's gypsy intellect, so long bewildered by the 'pageantry of dead faiths,' so long obsessed by the incommunicable sorrow of the world, yet pledged to the quest of 'the absolute' by the forces of his Celtic and Hellenic ancestry. At any rate the philosophy of Spencer came to him with something of the power and unction of an evangelical religion, bringing with it not only conversion, but conviction of sin,' and 'regeneration.' From this time on, there was a new seriousness in his life and a new gravity in his work. Henceforth he was concerned about the Exotic and Monstrous chiefly as they could be employed as parables of the gospel according to Herbert Spencer. A year or two later there came into his work another strain that was to remain potent,--the tropical. As early as 1879 he had felt the spell, and had written: 'So I draw my chair to the fire, light my pipe _de terre_ Gambièse, and in the flickering glow weave fancies of palm trees and ghostly reefs and tepid winds, and a Voice from the far tropics calls to me across the darkness.'