[16] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia.
On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to call at the office of the Cosmopolitan Magazine. On her arrival at eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss Bisland consented.
After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she published her experiences in the Cosmopolitan Magazine. These contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period.
Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return. He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never audible in dreams.
In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in the Tribune there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,—an absurd sense of absolute loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for you to win your race—so that every one may admire you still more, and your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your portrait—in spite of you—appear in some French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..."
I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face.
"It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you—all the Me's that were—keep asking the Me that is, for something always refused;—and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot see—you can only feel; and I can see,—and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,—and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come—and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ... what was it?
"Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of it,—just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly exposed.... Will you ever be like that always for any one being?—I hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the leaves."
Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and she married Mr. Wetmore.