The search for "inspiration," as he called it, was with Hearn constant and lifelong. Thus, early in his career, he wrote to his friend, Dr. Matas:
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 worshippers—with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes bathed in this azure and gold air—saturated with the perfume of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed—vivifying, illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion—the sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple. You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ....
And again he wrote:
I think I must get inspiration. The real secret of art is feeling. The highest form of that feeling is that which the splendour of Nature gives—the thrill and awe of terrible beauty. This is that inexplicable communication of the mind with the Unknowable that has created the religious sense. Said a friend to me yesterday, who is not a believer:—"I stood in the Alps at sunrise, and I knew what religion meant." And I think that passage in Wilson on Fetichism superb where he says that the sight of the splendid sky first created the religious sense. Terribly perverted this sense has been, no doubt; but it belongs, I fancy, to those things which are eternal, and will have many a glorious avatar before our planet floats off into the cemetery of dead worlds. It is, I believe, the most powerful possible motive for true modern poetry—in harmony with science and scientific faith; and that is what I am going to look for.
Such quotations could be multiplied indefinitely, but toward the end they become begging, and moaning in character. The "inspiration" is diligently hunted, hungrily waited for; at last the failure in its coming grows pitiful and tragic. For what is inspiration? If, with the fatal fashion of our fashionable fatalism, we think "we have outgrown all that," all that which was real and genuine inspiring, we at least cannot outgrow that which bred the belief in the inspiring, the trust in spirit and in spiritual truths and forces. Is it all primitive childishness, this faith in a real breathing-in of the higher life into our more carnal hearts and minds? Far from it! It is the veriest of verities, and the deniers of the conditions of inspiration dry up the springs of that "inspiration" which they so hungrily seek. The semblance cannot be without the reality. It will not come, lasting and inexhaustible, by any trick of literary technic. Out of the light of common day is not born that which never was on any sea or shore. Place, time, circumstance, are not, as Hearn thought, the gods of "Inspiration." "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and even a heathen god would hardly visit the altar with his sacred fire if the priests mocked at the power and the very existence of the deity. It is most plain that Hearn early and zealously studied the Bible—hundreds of allusions bear witness of the fact—and that he learned from it the revivification of words, the use of phrase, metaphor, belief, something of the art of reaching in toward the depths of men's moral and religious nature and experience: but all, just so evidently, as a literary art, a tour de force, the skill of the expert workman, handling them as symbols for the sake of the skill, while smiling scornfully at any belief in their reality. Language is the most spirit-like creation of man's mind, the thing nearest him, woven out of his own soul-substance, instinct with his life, haunted with his love, his hate, his suffering. Playing with words, using them as art-stuff, regardless of the experience and love and suffering which gave them conceiving and gives them quickening, is likely to bring upon the artist a sad revenge. Pleading in vain for "inspiration," Hearn died a score or more of years before he should have died.
It should be emphasized that Hearn had but one possible way, chosen or compelled, to make a living. His terrible myopia shut him out from every calling except that of a writer. Moreover, leaving aside the danger to his little vision from so much ocular labour, he had other and almost insurmountable handicaps as a poet or maker of literature: He had no original thing to say, for he was entirely without creative power, and had always to borrow theme and plot. Then he had never seen form, knew almost nothing of it as it exists out there, so that his sole technic was that of a colourist, and also to endow our dead and dying words with life—a "ghostly" life it was, and as he chose it to be—but living it assuredly was. That he over-coloured his pictures, that he over-sensualized his words, of this there is no question—but monotones and senescents that we are, let us not smile too superciliously! Let us learn; and above all let us enjoy!
For, his alone was the palette of the painter of the afterglow of Earth's last sunset. And his the unique miracle of clothing with the hues of a hopeless rainbow, the faint reverberations of bells far sunk in the wreck and wrack of ruined centuries; of reintoning the prayers of Nirvâna-entering souls; of remoaning dear ancient and expiring griefs; of seeing with shut eyes the sad smiles of never-answered loves and never-meeting lovers. With him, hushed, we hearken to Muezzin Bilâl's call from his tower, to the broken sobs of a dancing-girl's passion, or to the plaintive beggings of dying babes for the cold breasts of dead mothers.