Lafcadio Hearn

Front matter

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Preface

When Death has set his seal on an eminent man 's career, there is a not unnatural curiosity to know something of his life, as revealed by himself, particularly in letters to, intimate friends. **A11 biography ought, as much as possible, to be autobiography," says Stevenson, and of all autobiographical material, letters are the most satisfactory. Generally written on the impulse of the moment, with no idea of subsequent publication, they come, as it were, like butter fresh from the churning with the impress of the mind of the writer stamped distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's written to Flaubert, or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend Stilling, is worth pages of embellished reminiscences.

The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting, giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and passionately enthusiastic nature.

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During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to Chamberlain were written, he initiated a correspondence with his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His erratic nature, tamed and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo, turned with yearning towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years, and these Atkinson letters, though not boasting the high intellectual level of those to Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate playfulness, and in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under a new and delightful aspect.

There has been a certain amount of friction with his American editress, owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use these letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to criticisms and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual outspoken fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original form, to allow them to pass into the hands of any one but a person intimately connected with the Hearn family ; but I can assure Mrs. Wetmore and Captain Mitchell McDonald — those kind friends who have done so much for the sake of Hearn's children and widow — that ]\Irs. Koizumi, financially, suffers nothing from the fact of the letters not having crossed the Atlantic.

Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to make extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests* House, Ferbane, for having put me in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently Laf cadio 's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to give me much information concerning his college career.

I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan,

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to Mr. W. B. Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the period of his engagement as sub-editor to the Kobe Chronicle and Japan Mail.

But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of Hearn 's works for permission to make quotations from them ; to ]\Iessrs. Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from **Kotto" and "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation " ; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," " Shadowings, " and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs. Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French "West Indies"; and, above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn 's "Letters," for without quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn.

"What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you 'v\dll be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere. * '

How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed amongst the nineteenth century's best-

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known prose writers, to whom he looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and interest — the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold undisputed sway in the Far East.

SoutTimead,

Farnham Royal, 1911.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I Eably Years : 1

II Boyhood 23

Chapter I

"Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the soul. . . . What more, indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates — imaging sky, and land, and life — filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings — and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him? ... In each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be difi'erences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it — sun, moon, and stars — earth, sky, and sea — and mind and man, and space and time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker shapes for ever."

On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his grandmother, the following entry may be read: *' Patricio, Lafcadio, Tessima, Carlos Heam. August 1850, at Santa Maura."

The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio 's father or mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and remarkable figures of the end of the last century.

Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn.

On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock — mixture of Saxon and Celt — which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United Kingdom for the last two centuries. "We have no proof that Lafcadio 's grandfather — as has been stated — came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, w^hen he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace, and about the same time — as recognition for services done, we conclude — became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of Westmeath.

A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County Waterford — has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev. Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship with the County Westmeath portion of the family.

As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records certainly of several Daniel Hearns — it is the Christian name that furnishes the clue — occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire and Somersetshire.

In Burke ^s *^ Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally "cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the Herons — pronounced liearn — to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a well-lmown North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, ''The Heron Seeks the Heights."

]\Irs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his name *'Her'un," ''and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru' — heron with wings down — for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries, are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the various modifications of the word — namely, Erne, Home, Hearn, Hern, Heme, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic languages it is ii-ren, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. Hij-n, the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin errare and Frankish errant, with the Celtic err names are related, though the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or gipsies, is referred to.

I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly maintained b}^ some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of gipsies in a country lane in Ireland ; one of them, an old woman, offered to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger said, *'You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible sign of Romany descent.

Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members of the Hearn family. Lafcadio 's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn 's children by his second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element — quite distinct from the Japanese type— is so strong as to have impressed itself on Hearn 's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may, on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India.

On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio 's lineage is still more full of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek ; Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand, maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the agricultural richness of the

Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his mother 's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in IMaltese census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands. The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian, half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes, migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original Venetian Maltese.

'*We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite addition — the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us, stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested themselves — the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited from his Anglo-Saxon forbears.

From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music.

Elizabeth Holmes ^s second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew — *' Veritable blunderers," as Lafcadio says, *'in the ways of the world. ' '

Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: **They seem to represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother. I mean * force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of soul . . . very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the 'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me ; my firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular directions — guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a resemblance in his children by two different mothers — and I want so much to find out if the resemblance is also psychological. ' '

Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio 's father, elected to enter the army, as his father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's *'Army List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he wa.s sent on the Medical Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849 infected the Ionian

Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor, additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands.

Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this half -Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore, necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep; the so-called ^'pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands.

But in telling the love story of Charles Heam and Rosa Tessima, there is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways. Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by aU accounts he had never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use.

Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress. A lock of hair was enclosed : —

"Dearest and nearest to my heart.

Thou art fairer than the silver moon. And I trust to see thee soon."

There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with the following : —

"Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love And evermore will beat for thee ! ! '*

**Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath.

Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo, but communication between the islands was frequent.

As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland, of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she was entitled to ; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount of friction.

Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island, excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends." Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond.

Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world — the world that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty — impressed itself upon Hearn 's imagination. Often, later, amidst the godhaunted shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court — ^his mother, presumably — chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and temples of the ancient Leucadia. . . .

Awakening, he heard, in the night, the moaning of the real sea — the muttering of the Tide of the Returning Ghosts.

Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta. How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had left with his regiment, it is impossible to say.

Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old. He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard. Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother *'Dick" — indeed, all his belongings — were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task entrusted to him.

Charles Hearn 's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at Gardner's Place. ''Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript; the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of social circles in Dublin ; the arrival and departure of servants, the interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a text from the Gospels and Epistles.

Because of the political and religious animus existing between Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England. All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation, thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate opinions.

On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn 's diary: ''Dear Richard arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7 o 'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady! Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: *'A letter from

Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies ! Dear, beloved fellow ! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us/' Then on August 1st: ''Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs. Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later, in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to perfectly harmless actions and statements.

Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son, having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major portion of the capital of Ireland.

The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory. She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe castigation.

When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them. In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever.

When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission of a *' Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another time, another heaven.