Yet those countless solar fires, with their viewless millions of living planets, must somehow reappear: again the wondrous Cosmos, self-born as self-consumed, must resume its sidereal whirl over the deeps of the eternities. And the love that strives for ever with death shall rise again, through fresh infinitudes of pain, to renew the everlasting battle.
The light of the mother's smile will survive our sun;—the thrill of her kiss will last beyond the thrilling of stars;—the sweetness of her lullaby will endure in the cradle-songs of worlds yet unevolved;—the tenderness of her faith will quicken the fervour of prayers to be made to the hosts of another heaven,—to the gods of a time beyond Time. And the nectar of her breasts can never fail: that snowy stream will still flow on, to nourish the life of some humanity more perfect than our own, when the Milky Way that spans our night shall have vanished for ever out of Space.
Like unto the Soul is a Drop of Dew for
Your personality signifies, in the eternal order, just as much as the especial motion of molecules in the shivering of any single drop. Perhaps in no other drop will the thrilling and the picturing be ever exactly the same; but the dews will continue to gather and to fall, and there will always be quivering pictures.... The very delusion of delusions is the idea of death as loss.
Kwaidan[39] (17) was the book before "Japan," which was published after Hearn's death. It is a collection of old stories, many of them of the gruesome, and of careful studies of ants, mosquitoes, and butterflies. Striking is the tale of Yuki-Onna, the snow-woman, as is also the incident of Riki-Baka. One bewitched by the dead is Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi, whose ears were torn off because the holy texts which were written everywhere else upon his body were there forgotten. Sonjō, the hunter, killed the mate of a female oshidori, who after appearing to him in a dream as a beautiful woman, who rebukes him the following day as a bird, tears open her body, and dies before his eyes. O-Tei is reborn in the shape of a woman that she may wed years later her promised husband—Nagao Chōsei of Echigo. So loyal is the love of O-Sodé, the milk-nurse, that the cherry-tree which is planted in commemoration of her, on the anniversary of her death, blossoms in a wonderful way. Because of his selfish wickedness in thinking only of the gains in his profession, a priest was made to be reborn into the state of a jikininki, who had to devour the corpses of people who died in his district. Other devourers of human flesh are the Rokuro-Kubi. The head of a Rokuro-Kubi separates itself from its body.
[ [39] Copyright, 1904, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Japan[40] (18): An Attempt at Interpretation is the last book that Hearn published. He was reading its proofs at the time of his death. Although a posthumous volume appeared, this may rightly be termed his final word. It is the crystallization and the summary of all that has been said before. It contains a group of twenty-one lectures, which Hearn had expected at first to deliver at Cornell University. His own words will best reveal their import:—
[ [40] Copyright, 1904, by the Macmillan Company.
They will form a book explaining Japan from the standpoint of ancestor-worship. They are suited only to a cultivated audience.
The substantial idea of the lectures is that Japanese society represents the condition of ancient Greek society a thousand years before Christ. I am treating of religious Japan,—not of artistic or economical Japan except by way of illustration.
"The history of Japan is really the history of her religion," is the key to the book.
The Academy remarks:—