In 1884 he made the visit to Grande Isle in the Mexican Gulf that resulted in his 'Chita,' which is still in many respects his most astonishing _tour de force_ in word-painting, though in it we see how far away he was from the English tradition of creative art in fiction. The only logic in the harrowing conclusion is the emotional logic of a temperament immitigably macabresque, that must make a tale of terror intensify in poignancy to the end. In 1887, he went to the French West Indies, and found there a theme perhaps more in consonance with the full richness of his vein than any he afterwards encountered. In 'Youma,' his West Indian novelette, the note is certainly falsetto, but in his 'Two Years in the French West Indies' the luxuriant leafiness of his style, heavy with tropical perfumes, subtly interpenetrated with the sense of tropical terror, rarely goes beyond the bounds of faithful depiction. And underneath it all we begin to see that impressive Spencerian perception of the fatal unity of the world. In June, 1888, Hearn landed in New York, but drunken as he was with tropic light, he was troubled by the canyoned streets, and returned to Martinique by the same boat that had brought him. In the following year he was in Philadelphia, preparing his West Indian books for the press. At this time he suddenly conceived a passionate and characteristic interest in Japan from reading Mr. Percival Lowell's 'The Soul of the Far East.' His correspondence is full of it. 'How luminous,' he exclaims, 'how psychically electric!' It was with boundless delight and with the highest hopes that he welcomed a suggestion that he should go to Japan to prepare a series of articles upon that country.