young men who could understand only the general drift of them, and with no likelihood, as it seemed, that they would ever come under the review of Western readers. Yet day in and day out Hearn lectured at Tokyo before his boys with the same care and with the same elevation of spirit as though he had been addressing an audience at the Sorbonne or at Oxford--or better, as though he had been the official instead of the accidental spokesman for Western letters, and as though the whole East, and not only his limited classroom, were hanging on his words. This consecration to work done in obscurity is as rare in teaching as in other human activities. Observing it on every page of Hearn's lectures, I marvel at the integrity of his character. One is tempted to speak in detail of all the lectures in this book--of the special merit of each, and of the relation of one to the other. It will be sufficient, however, to say a word of the chapter on Rossetti, which exhibits Hearn's method and his success. Rossetti usually seems, even to his admirers, a poet of temperament and color, diffuse temperament and exotic color; in so much sensuousness it has not been easy for the casual critic to trace the intellectual fibre. But Hearn observes that the plots of Rossetti's ballads, stripped somewhat of their Rossetti decorations, are stirring plots, contrived by an energetic mind. With this clue he undertakes to show us that Rossetti's work is all of an intellectual architecture, however emotional the surface of it may be. To read what Hearn says of the "Staff and Scrip," and then to read the ballad, is to discover a new poem, with the conviction besides that the poem is what Hearn discovered it to be. If the reader of Rossetti thinks this praise of Hearn's chapter is excessive, let him run over at his leisure all the other criticism of Rossetti he can find. He will agree at last that here is criticism of the first order--the criticism which opens our eyes to things in books, and thereby to the things in life of which books are only the mirror. JOHN ERSKINE. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I STUDIES IN ROSSETTI CHAPTER II NOTE UPON ROSSETTI'S PROSE CHAPTER III STUDIES IN SWINBURNE CHAPTER IV STUDIES IN BROWNING CHAPTER V WILLIAM MORRIS CHAPTER VI THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH CHAPTER VII "THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT" CHAPTER VIII VIII A NOTE ON ROBERT BUCHANAN CHAPTER IX ROBERT BRIDGES INDEX PRE-RAPHAELITE AND OTHER POETS CHAPTER I STUDIES IN ROSSETTI I