human
is diligently hunted, hungrily waited for; at last the failure in its coming grows pitiful and tragic. For what is inspiration? If, with the fatal fashion of our fashionable fatalism, we think
gpt
all that which was real and genuine inspiring, we at least cannot outgrow that which bred the belief in the inspiring, the trust in spirit and in spiritual truths and forces. Is it all primitive childishness, this faith in a real breathing-in of the higher life into our more carnal hearts and minds? Far from it! It is the veriest of verities, and the _deniers_ of the conditions of inspiration dry up the springs of that
human
which they so hungrily seek. The semblance cannot be without the reality. It will not come, lasting and inexhaustible, by any trick of literary technic. Out of the light of common day is not born that which never was on any sea or shore. Place, time, circumstance, are not, as Hearn thought, the gods of
gpt
Inspiration.
human
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and even a heathen god would hardly visit the altar with his sacred fire if the priests mocked at the power and the very existence of the deity. It is most plain that Hearn early and zealously studied the Bible--hundreds of allusions bear witness of the fact--and that he learned from it the revivification of words, the use of phrase, metaphor, belief, something of the art of reaching in toward the depths of men's moral and religious nature and experience: but all, just so evidently, as a literary art, a _tour de force_, the skill of the expert workman, handling them as symbols for the sake of the skill, while smiling scornfully at any belief in their reality. Language is the most spirit-like creation of man's mind, the thing nearest him, woven out of his own soul-substance, instinct with his life, haunted with his love, his hate, his suffering. Playing with words, using them as art-stuff, regardless of the experience and love and suffering which gave them conceiving and gives them quickening, is likely to bring upon the artist a sad revenge. Pleading in vain for