"Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on investigating for himself what he wrote about; but what the Sun states is not only untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern city like New Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If Hearn had been the man the Sun says he was, he could not have held the position he did a week, much less the long years he remained in this city.... He certainly was not conventional in the order of his life any more than he was in the product of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge upon him."
In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the Enquirer, and in the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the Commercial, but he had too seriously wounded the susceptibilities of society in Cincinnati to make existence any longer comfortable, or, indeed, possible. The uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit his delicate constitution. He longed to get away.
Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South, his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a November morning, were oddly connected with Jean ah-Poquelin. Even before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond the wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar sheds, to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion.
A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes of the statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any difference of opinion with the editor of the Commercial. In fact, money for the journey was given to him as well as a roving commission for letters from Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the newspaper.
CHAPTER VIII
MEMPHIS
"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 ..." [12]
[12] Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin.