The chief morbid factor in Hearn's physical constitution was his vision. One eye was totally blind, the other had, it is said, but one twentieth of normal vision; but too much has been made of this as a qualification of his genius. His monocular vision gave him, of course, landscape 'flat,' without perspective and depth; but undoubtedly, like the half-closed eye of the painter, it gave him color in wonderful harmonious intensity, and who shall say that it was with a vividness beyond Nature? The tremendous cumulative rhapsody of blue at the beginning of his 'Two Years in the French West Indies' is said by those who best know the Southern seas not to exceed reality. And there is plenty of evidence that in his quick, comprehending glances through the single eyeglass that he habitually carried, he seized minute significant details of persons or objects which others missed. It has been said by one who should be qualified to know, that he saw his world as partially and obscurely as one who looks through the large end of an opera-glass; but the analogy is imperfect unless we remember that objects so seen are given not only with remoteness, but with rich color, and with a curious artistic composition like a Claude in miniature. But after all it was the lens in the brain that counted with Hearn. As opposed to his vision, his visionary faculty was of the first order. From boyhood, 'ghostly' was his characteristic, as it finally came to be almost his trick word. He envisaged wraiths and vanished cities with a definition more like that of objective than of subjective sight. Only his skeptical intelligence kept him from being a thoroughgoing spirit-seer. Perhaps his most characteristic mood was that reflected in his impressive essay on 'Dust' in 'Gleanings from Buddha Fields'--'I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being haunted,--haunted by the prodigious luminous spectre of the world.' It is not necessary to go much further about to apprehend the inner nature of Lafcadio Hearn. In the same 'Dust' there is a 'lyrical' paragraph that conveys him very perfectly:-- 'I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"--not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; and the nominal government, supposed to be rational, declares that an eternity of such anarchy is not desirable. I have souls wanting to soar in air, and souls wanting to swim in water (sea-water, I think), and souls wanting to live in woods or on mountain tops.' And so on through a Homeric catalogue of his souls, till at the end he breaks out, '_I_ an individual,--an individual soul! Nay, I am a population,-a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions!'