Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist: Early Writings

... Jeune artiste, tu attends un sujet? Tout est sujet; le sujet c'est toi-même: ce sont tes impressions, tes emotions devant la nature. C'est toi qu'il faut regarder, et non autour de toi.
Eugène Delacroix .
CONTENTS
On a memorable day a good many years ago a certain sub-editor, exploring the morning's mail, found his sense enthralled by a weird, sad, delicious odor. Perfumes in the mail were not unheard-of: violets there had been, and musk, and orange blossoms, and tobacco; and the sub-editor, with a fantasy appropriate to his station, even prided himself on his ability to close his eyes and pick out a California contribution by the unaided sense of smell. But never before had there been anything like this. Its chief essence was sandalwood, that was clear, but sandalwood so etherealized and mingled with I know not what of exotic scents that it gave to the imagination a provocative ghostly thrill indescribable. The basket of the Muses, hastily tumbled, disclosed a portentous envelope of straw color, with queer blue stamps in one corner, and queer unknown characters in another; yet queerest of all was the address in an odd orientalized hand, done with delicate, curiously curving strokes of the pen. Within, in a script still less Spencerian, these words met the sub-editor's excited eye:—
The Dream of Akinosuké
'In the district called Toïchi of Yamato province, there used to live a gōshi named Miyata Akinosuké'; and so on through some twenty pages, telling a mystical legend of old Japan in a lovely and melodious English style.
This was the writer's first introduction to Lafcadio Hearn, known to him up to that time only by a somewhat formidable repute as 'the best interpreter of Japan,' and mentally scheduled for perusal on a convenient opportunity which had never come. Since then Hearn's twenty volumes have been read and reread; there has been correspondence with his family and friends and with some who were not his friends; his complicated life has been investigated in detail; yet the sharpness, the intensity, of that first experience of his quality is not blurred. The impression that persists is that of weird, sad, delicious savor, of ghostly thrill.