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Abstract

Why these longings for lands in which we shall never be?-why this desire for that azure into which we cannot soar?-whence our mysterious love for that tumultuous deep into whose emerald secrets we may never peer? wrote Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) while visiting Florida in 1885. "Has it not often seemed to you that the more antiquated and the more unfamiliar an object or a place is, the more it appears at first sight to live,- to possess a sort of inner being, a fetish-spirit, a soul?"2 Such are the questions a reader of the great impressionistic writer might expect him to ask; for it is Hearn who will forever be remembered as that romantic and foreign observer of Meiji-era Japan. Yet before ever being viewed as a western emissary to the Far East, Hearn-the half Greek, half Irish immigrant to the United States-worked as a journalist for the New Orleans Times-Democrat.3 The Crescent City proved a wondrous melting pot of cultural experiences which refused to allow the writer's mind to rest for long. Urges to venture beyond his Gate of the Tropics would take a leap forward with a trip to primitive Florida;4 the experiences there collected being those which would eventually drive Hearn, the traveling prosateur, further south to live among the Antilles and their phosphorescent seas.

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