Lafcadio Hearn was another master of the same kind, working with a sentence-line of keener, sharper, spirit-winged beauty. Few literatures of the world can show anything to surpass Hearn at his best. It is possible to diagram with something approaching accuracy the effect of a sentence upon the muscles of the body. A fine sentence is a geometrical sound-picture affecting the body as line affects the eye, built up out of vowels, soft padding of consonants packed between, to keep them from bruising each other in their expanding ecstacy, their lift, their lyric laugh. The greatest rhythms are personal rhythms, that conform to no rule save deeps of self, consciousness of world-currents, the moment’s inspired emotion. Lafcadio Hearn is a delicate, learned, vowel-musician. No language has a master who surpasses him. Listen to this, (I quote from memory): “So I wait for the poet’s Pentecost, the inspiration of nature, the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten and the Sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshipper, with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds.” Learned, exquisite, infinitely wise in construction. He has worked magic. Hear this from Aristophanes: “Our splendid dithyrambs are misty and duskyish, and dark gleaming, and high flown.” This from Euripedes, from one of the choruses of Electra: “In ancient song is the tale yet told, How Pan the master of forest and mead, Unearthly sweet while the melody rolled, From his pipes of cunningly linked reed, Did of yore from the mountains of Argus lead From the midst of the tender ewes of the fold....” The construction shines through the none too skillful turning into a modern tongue, in both examples. And in both we still feel recurrence of balanced sound that can not be reproduced in English, and unmapped spaces of loveliness. Goethe declares, thinking, perhaps, of this: “_Man studiere nicht die Mitgeborenen und Mitstrebenden, sondern grosse Menschen der Vorseit, deren Werke seit Jahrhunderten gleichen Wert und gleiches Ansehen behalten haben.... Man studiere Molière, man studiere Shakespeare, aber vor allen Dingen, die alten Griechen, und immer die alten Griechen._” (Study not always men of your own age and those engaged in the same occupation as yourself, but likewise the great men of antiquity whose works have kept the same worth for centuries.... Study Molière, study Shakespeare, above all things study the ancient Greeks, _and always the ancient Greeks_.) The choruses of Euripedes are among the loveliest things in existence, an undying beauty, which not time nor change mar. Do you happen to recall this? _The long white reach of Achilles’ Beach Where his ghost feet shine on the sand._