Percival Lowell — an afterglow/Quotations
QUOTATIONS
BEFORE presenting the quotations from his letters, these tokens of appreciation of his genius by Dr. Lowell's contemporaries, Professor Emeritus Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, and the late Lafcadio Hearn, will illuminate them and charm the reader. In a letter to Dr. Lowell, from Japan, Professor Wendell says:
. . . "You have been in my mind constantly through these last few weeks. The 'Soul of the Far East' seemed good to me, when I first read it, years ago. How wonderfully good it is, though, no one can begin to know who has not been brought face to face with the bewildering marvels of this utterly different world. I have just been reading in supplement, Lafcadio Hearn's 'Japan,' which gives your brilliant psychology the historical setting almost needful to bring out its full power. As you go on, I reverence more and more such power as yours of doing things really. If you had never done anything but this excellent trace of your past, you would stay among those who will never be forgotten. ..."(B.W.)
In a published correspondence between Mr. Hearn and his friend George M. Gould, Esq., Mr. Gould writes: "Perhaps I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt 'Japan' had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during his stay with me. In sending it to me he wrote:
"'Gooley! ... I have found a marvellous book ... a book of books! ... a colossal, splendid, godlike book. You must read every line of it. Tell me how I can send it. For heaven's sake don't skip a word of it. The book is called "The Soul of the Far East" but its title is smaller than its imprint."Hearneyboy."
"'P.S.—Let something else go to H, and read this book instead. May God eternally bless and infinitely personalize the man who wrote this book! Please don't skip one solitary line of it and don't delay reading it,—because something, much! is going to go out of it into your heart and life and stay there! I have just finished this book and feel like John of Patmos,—only a d—d sight better. He who shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off and his name blotted out of the Book of Life.'"
Later came a note about the book which brought this unalloyed and characteristic touch:
"The man who wrote 'The Soul of the Far East' and 'Choson' is nevertheless an accomplished math
IN HIS JAPANESE GARDEN—TŌKYŌ
ematician. But you will notice that his divine poetry touches only that which no scientific knowledge can explain,—that which no mathematics can solve,—that which must remain mysterious throughout all conceivable space and time—the fluttering of the Human Soul in its chrysalis, which it at once hates and loves, and hates because it loves, and strives to burst through, and still fears unspeakably to break,—though dimly conscious of the infinite ghostly Peace beyond."