[18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co.
Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution—created by experiences of vanished being more countless than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark the sadness only lingered—unutterable—profound.
CHAPTER XIV
WEST INDIES
"Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,—over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes from the hills—all cool out of the sleep of the forest, ... and the wild high winds that run roughling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound. And the mighty dreaming of the woods,—green drenched with silent pouring of creepers ... and the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea.... And the violet velvet distances of evening, and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning sunset,—when all the heavens seem filled with vapours of a molten sun!"
In the early part of June, 1887, Hearn left New Orleans, and made his way to New York via Cincinnati. He went to see no one in the western city, where he had been so well known, but his old friend Mr. Watkin. Seated in the printing-office, then situated at 26, Longworth Street, they chatted together all day to the accompaniment of the ticking of the tall clock, loud and insistent, like the footstep of a man booted and spurred. We can imagine their discussions and arguments on the subject of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, Esoteric Buddhism, and "that which the Christian calls soul,—the Pantheist Nature,—the philosopher, the Unknowable."
Hearn took his departure from Cincinnati late in the evening. A delightful trip, he wrote to Mr. Watkin, had brought him safe and sound to New York, where his dear friend, Krehbiel, was waiting to receive him and take him as a guest to his cosy home. "I cannot tell you," he adds, "how our little meeting delighted me, or how much I regretted to depart so soon.... I felt that I loved you more than I ever did before; feel also how much I owed you and will always owe you."
Mr. Watkin, who died in the spring of 1911, aged eighty-six, spent the last years of his life in the "Old Men's Home" in Cincinnati. I received a letter from him a few months before his death relating to his friend Lafcadio Hearn. After this meeting in 1887, he was never fated to see his "Raven," but the old man kept religiously all the letters written to him by the odd little genius, who forty years before had so often sat with him in his printing-office, pouring forth his hopes and ambitions, his opinions and beliefs, his wild revolts and despairs. Loyally did the old printer add his voice to Krehbiel's and Tunison's in defence of his reputation after Hearn's death in 1904.