Through this study, reading, and brooding Lafcadio Hearn’s prose ripened and mellowed consistently to the end.  In mere workmanship the present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened passages, like the final paragraph of “The Romance of the Milky Way,” the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily matched from any but the very greatest English prose.

In substance the volume is equally significant.  In 1884 he wrote to one of the closest of his friends that he had at last found his feet intellectually through the reading of Herbert Spencer which had dispelled all “isms” from his mind and left him “the vague but omnipotent consolation of the Great Doubt.”  And in “Ultimate Questions,” which strikes, so to say, the dominant chord of this volume, we have an almost lyrical expression of the meaning for him of the Spencerian philosophy and psychology.  In it is his characteristic mingling of Buddhist and Shinto thought with English and French psychology, strains which in his work “do not simply mix well,” as he says in one of his letters, but “absolutely unite, like chemical elements—­rush together with a shock;”—­and in it he strikes his deepest note.  In his steady envisagement of the horror that envelops the stupendous universe of science, in his power to evoke and revive old myths and superstitions, and by their glamour to cast a ghostly light of vanished suns over the darkness of the abyss, he was the most Lucretian of modern writers.

* * * * *

In outward appearance Hearn, the man, was in no way prepossessing.  In the sharply lined picture of him drawn by one of his Japanese comrades in the “Atlantic” for October, 1905, he appears, “slightly corpulent in later years, short in stature, hardly five feet high, of somewhat stooping gait.  A little brownish in complexion, and of rather hairy skin.  A thin, sharp, aquiline nose, large protruding eyes, of which the left was blind and the right very near-sighted.”

The same writer, Nobushige Amenomori, has set down a reminiscence, not of Hearn the man, but of Hearn the genius, wherewith this introduction to the last of his writings may fitly conclude:  “I shall ever retain the vivid remembrance of the sight I had when I stayed over night at his house for the first time.  Being used myself also to sit up late, I read in bed that night.  The clock struck one in the morning, but there was a light in Hearn’s study.  I heard some low, hoarse coughing.  I was afraid my friend might be ill; so I stepped out of my room and went to his study.  Not wanting, however, to disturb him, if he was at work, I cautiously opened the door just a little, and peeped in.  I saw my friend intent in writing at his high desk, with his nose almost touching the paper.  Leaf after leaf he wrote on.  In a while he held up his head, and what did I see!  It was not the Hearn I was familiar with; it was another Hearn.  His face was mysteriously white; his large eye gleamed.  He appeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence.