and Elizabeth, and Evelina or Marianna Alcoforado should ever hear that I was taken or a thief."

"You are laughing at us," said Eliz sharply. "We know that you will go away and make fun of us to all your friends."

"If I do you will have one way of punishing me that would give me more pain than I could well endure, you can shut me out next time I come to ask for shelter."

"Oh, but you can't come again," said Eliz, with vibrating note of fierce discontent; "our stepmother will be here.” He looked at Madge.

come

"I was going to say that the other way in which you could make amends would be to give me leave to back; and if you give me leave I will come, even if it be necessary, to that end, to get an introduction from all the clergy in Great Britain, or from the royal family."

A ray of hope shot into Madge's dark eyes, the first glimmer of a smile began to show through her distress.

"It is an old adage that 'where there is a will there is a way,' and did I not walk on your most impossible snow-shoes and bring back your silver?"

Madge looked down, a pretty red began to mantle her pale face, and, as if the angels who manage the winds and clouds did not wish that the blush of so dear a maiden should betray too much, a ray of scarlet light from the sinking sun just then came winging through the dispersing storm-clouds and caused all the white snow-world to redden, and dyed the frost-flowers on the window-pane, and, entering where the pane was bare, lit all the room with soft vermilion light. So, in the wondrous blush of the white world, the girl's cheeks glowed and yet did not confess too much.

"You will allow me to send in your compliments and inquire after Mr. Woodhouse as I pass?" This was Courthope's farewell to Eliz, and she called joyfully in reply:

"You need not send back his mes

'all very indifferent.'"

Into the scarlet shining of the western sun, an omen of fair weather and delight, Courthope set forth again from the square tin-roofed house, "leaving," as the saying is, "his heart behind him." The large farm horses, restive from long confinement and stimulated by the frost, shook their bells with energy. The Morin women displayed such good-will and even tenderness in their attentions to the comfort of the second prisoner, in whom they had found an old friend, that, tied in a blanket and lying full length on the straw of a Dox-sleigh, he looked content with himself and the world, albeit he had not as yet returned from the happy roving-places of the drunken brain. The talkative clerk was glad enough to give Courthope the reins of the masterful horses; he sat on one edge of the blue-painted box and Courthope on the other; thus they started, bravely plunging into the drifts between the poplars. The drifts were all tinged with pink; the poplars, intercepting the red light upon their slender upright boughs, cast, each of them, a clear shadow that seemed to lie in endless length athwart the glowing sward.

Courthope looked back at the house which had been so dim and phantomlike the night before; the red sun lit the icicles that hung from eaves and lintels, tinged the drifts, glowed upon the windows as if with light from within, and turned the steep tin roof into a gigantic rose; but all his glance was centred upon his lady-love, who stood, regardless of the cold, at the entrance of the drift-encircled porch and watched them as long as the sunlight lay upon the land. Was she looking at the plunging sleigh and at its driver, or at the wondrous chasms of light in the rent cloud beyond? His heart told him, as he drove on into the very midst of the sunset which had embraced the glistening land, that the maid, although not regardless of the outer glory, only rejoiced to the full in its beauty because the vision of her

heart was focussed upon him. His heart, in telling him this, taught him no pride, for had he not learned in the same small space of time only to count himself rich in what she gave? And it was for this unreasonable reason that the sunset for him had greater splendor, that for the hour the hard, sad facts of wickedness and misery, even though they lay at his very feet, were as though they were not.

Slow was the progress of the great horses; they passed the grove of high elms and birches that, dressed in the snowflakes that had lodged in boughs and branches when the wind dropped, stood up clear against the gulfs of blue that now opened above and beyond. Then the house was hidden, and after that, by degrees, the light of the sunset passed away.

From The Edinburgh Review. CATHOLIC MYSTICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.1

There are certain terms of general classification that seem predestined to breed confusion in criticism and thought; and among these the term of Mysticism might be almost considered one of the most pre-eminently bewildering. Under the head of Mystics we find included indifferently a Sta. Teresa and a St. Francis d'Assisi, a Maeterlinck and a Paul Verlaine. The epithet, indeed, is one of those of which the significance embraces such varying characteristics that no dictionary can keep pace with the subtle developments it is perpetually acquiring. In this case, as in many another,

11. Santa Teresa: her Life and Times. By Gabriela Cunninghame Graham. 2 vols. London: 1894.

2. St. John of the Cross: Life of, and Works. "The Ascent of Mount Carmel." "The Dark Night of the Soul," etc. 2 vols. Translated by David Lewis, M.A. London: 1889, 1891.

3. Blessed Henry Suso: Life of. Related by

Himself. Translated by T. F. Knox. London: 1865.

4. XVI Revelations of Juliana of Norwich. Reprint.1 843

no effort of scientist or philosopher avails to set barriers to the fresh interpretations of ancient formulas.

The friction of common use wears away old limits, and the daily language of daily life, hurrying past, confesses its poverty of invention by a constant adaptation of old verbal symbols-begged, borrowed, and stolen from the most unlikely sources-to its own immediate exigencies. Thus it is, as we all know and continually forget, that, while the diction of bygone days survives, senses utterly unfamiliar to the past attach themselves to every part of speech, making, in the matter of meanings, a recurrent game of definitions for the grammarians of each successive generation. The threefold problem of past, present, and future is always confronting us in the vocabulary of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. What did these words mean once to those in whose footprints we tread, whose voices we echo, with all that gulf of dissimilarity a lingering likeness serves to accentuate. What will they mean on the lips of those to come after us, associated with accumulated combinations of memory, recolored with the atmosphere of unborn years, when the very thoughts of which language is to-day the sign audible will have assumed aspects our fancy swerves in anticipating?

Thus, arrested by the strange riddle of that phase of human life and thought and feeling, presented in the records of those men and women of medieval Europe to whom by common consent the name of Mystics has been specially accorded, it becomes necessary to circumscribe and restrict the designation. Further, to analyze what general quality is indieated, from this narrowed point of view, by the term recently applied, without discrimination of species, to so many forms of supernaturalism, to all systems of symbolism, and to most of the obscurer manifestations of emotional or

intellectual spiritualism. To do this effectually we must in the first place divest mysticism of some of its attributes and accessories-from the

dogmas of special sects, and from the fantastic extravagancies of special schools-with which it has been intimately connected.

That the Catholic Mystic of the West has been inseverably allied with the miracle-worker and vision-seer is undeniable. That he and his Protestant brethren, both in the portraitures of life and of fiction, are often and justly identified with the crude idea of supernaturalism-with, that is, the idea of preternatural and extraneous powers working by personal or material agencies-is equally apparent. Yet, if supernaturalism be regarded as the continent, mysticism holds within that continent a fortressed rainbow country of its own. Even more, it is alleged by certain initiates that the creed of the supernaturalist is hardly consonant with that of the genuine mystic viewed in the light of later interpreters. And there is an understratum of truth in this apparent paradox, for to the mystic, although in outward substance and form his miracle or vision might be the very same as the miracle or vision of the mere supernaturalist, the cause would claim another origin. By the writers of earlier ages a clear difference was recognized between one vision and another. The external or "bodily showing," of which they speak, and which may be classed as the supernatural vision, was not confounded with the "ghostly seeing" of the understanding, albeit the same person might at one and the same time possess both faculties of vision. "All this showed by three parts," a fourteenthcentury seer says, "by bodily sight, by words formed in my understanding, and by ghostly sight." And Serenus de Cressy, the de Cressy of whom the author of "John Inglesant" has drawn a winning if not an historical portrait in the romance to which he owes his literary reputation-writes, that those visions "which were more pure, intime, and withal more certayne, were wrought by a divine illapse into the spiritual [as distinguished from the sensual] part of the soul." These lat

was

ter constitute, strictly, the visions of mysticism.

Indeed, this pervading idea of undercurrents of life, of lives within lives, forms an elementary characteristic of the mystic's creed. What to the supernaturalist proper lies without to him lies within, and while, broadly speaking, the tendency of the supernaturalist has generally been to materialize spirit, that of the mystic has always, however unconsciously, led him to spiritualize the animal creation and to vitalize matter. Sir James Stephen, writing in this journal of St. Francis d'Assisi, makes the assertion that "each living thing was a brother or sister to him in a sense which almost ceased to be figurative. To all inanimate beings he ascribed a personality and a sentient nature in something more than a sport of fancy;" and Mrs. Graham, in her introduction to the life of Sta. Teresa, notes the naïf sympathy with nature and animal life, the community of obedience and worship, with birds, beasts, and plants, belonging to what may be called the mystic period of Sta. Teresa's order. Thus it was no fantastic childishness that impelled St. Francis to preach to mie sirocchie, the birds, or to undertake the conversion of such four-footed felons as the ferocissimo lupo d' Agobio. These legends, and they are many, embody a deep-sighted recognition of the multitudinous souls of creation, and as such are but a rational invocation to the life-created to laud and serve the life-creator, as to this day the churches sing "Benedicite, omnia opera Domini . . . ." Later exponents of the mystic's faith have betrayed a kindred sentiment. Nature, animal and vegetable, matter itself in its most inert substances, is to the mystic so replete with dormant energies that theoretically there is little scope left for exterior interpositions. Earth, if we may so express the position, can perform her own miracles-in fact, is always performing them. Such phrases as that employed by Novalis, in whom Moravian traditions lingered, when he says that the plants are language to

the earth's thoughts, are no empty figures of speech. Life-the faith has been summarized-slept in the stones, dreamt in the plants, and wakened in man.

"That this creed is capable of being converted into an irreligious pantheism I well know," Coleridge acknowledges, referring to Tauler, the fourteenth-century Dominican, to Jacob Böhme, the Lutheran theosophist of the sixteenth, and to other teachers of German mysticism. But he confesses that their writings at once served to prevent his mind becoming imprisoned by any single dogmatic system, and kept alive, to use his graphic expression, "the heart in the head." During his wanderings in the wilderness of doubt, he adds emphatically, if they were a moving cloud of smoke by day they were always a pillar of fire by night, and by their aid he "skirted without crossing the sandy desert of unbelief."

Whatever, nevertheless, might be the intellectual doctrines of mysticism to whose instrumentality Coleridge owed redemption, it must be borne in mind that in practice and action, in countries, times, and minds where primitive supernaturalism was a dominant habit of thought, each was commonly co-existent, if not co-extensive, with

form. There the utterance of the mystic becomes perforce that of the symbolist. Thus the stanzas of Fray Juan de la Cruz-a puritan among transcendentalists-are written in the language of pure similitudes. He paraphrases the apostrophes of the Song of Solomon, of Spanish serenades, of pastoral verses with equal boldness.

Where hast thou hidden Thyself
And abandoned me in my groaning, O my
Beloved?

Having wounded me;

Thou hast fled like the hart,

I ran after thee crying; but thou wert gone,

are the words the saint of asceticism

places in the mouth of the soul. And in another poem, when the soul sets out on her pursuit of perfection, he thus describes the search:

In a dark night,

With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest
In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised.

O, happy lot!

In darkness and concealment My house being now at rest.

verse:

Nor is the admixture of mysticism and supernaturalism the only element of confusion in the definition of the former. At every page it is the inevitable fate of the mystic to employ the phraseology of symbolism. There is a recurrent point where the imagery by which he intends to convey the conception of an actuality is fused with the language by which he intends to convey the conception of an allegorical figure (Wahrzeichen). A determinate boundary line exists, as Novalis points out, to the mental capacities of definite conception, beyond which representation cannot retain strength or

A shepherd is alone and in pain,
Deprived of all pleasure and joy,
His thoughts on his shepherdess intent,
And his heart by love cruelly torn.

In such allegories San Juan strives, as he himself explains, to convey those meanings to the mind of his readers that common speech could not convey. On the other hand, when Henry Suso sees the Eternal Wisdom seated beside his soul, "which, leaning lovingly towards God's side, and encircled by God's arms, lay entranced," he is evidently attempting to depict what was to him an actuality of spiritual vision. The blending of either method, when the vision of the utterable passes into the vision of the unutterable, should

not, however, be suffered to blur the distinction between the attitude of the pure mystic and that of the pure symbolist. To the mere symbolist the interconnection of the emblem with that which it allegorizes is accidental, temporal, and artificial, but to the believer in the undercurrents of nature's vitalities a symbol must be more than a symbol. It must not only represent as an arbitrary cypher the spiritual object symbolized, it must have some fundamental affinity with it; it must possess some radical correspondence of life with life, permanent, essential, and vital.

Setting, however, aside this aspect of the question, it remains to solve the problem, to detect when and where the written language should be taken to represent a similitude, and when and where it must be accepted as signifying an actuality. To unravel this riddle is the thankless task of the commentators, who, each according to his own creed, adhere to the literal or the metaphorical interpretations of equivocal passages, or again explain both away.

In their simplicity of soul [Coleridge here is paraphrasing Schelling] the mystics made their words the immediate

echoes of their feelings. . . . Under the excitement of grasping new and vital truths the uneducated man of genius may easily mistake the tumultuous sensations of nerve, the spectres of fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths opening upon him.

Nor to those who are careful to inquire is such a line of apology without plausibility, though San Juan de la Cruz-than whom was no more competent judge offers a sterner solution. "Their mind and sense and feel

ings [of aspirants yet imperfect in the path of God] are full of fancies, whereby they very often see imaginary and spiritual visions . . . wherein the devil and their own proper fancy most frequently delude the soul." His sentence was doubtless as well merited as it was uncompromising.

Yet when every vision, every sensation, has been sifted, every inspiration analyzed, when the mystic's position has been accurately formulated, and his claims confuted or allowed, we, of the laity, may chance to feel that in matters of mysticism the critic labors but in vain. He may reduce it to a system, the "science absolument exacte," of M. Huysmans's biographical fiction; he can supply modern synonyms of obsolete terms, and elucidate the social or historical surroundings of bygone thought; he can define its species-theopathetic, theosophic or theurgic, transitive or intransitive. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, we are inclined to repudiate our obligations to the pen of the expositor, nay more, some amongst us might be well-nigh tempted to believe that we could have understood the text had it not been for the commentary!

was

The truth of the matter is that mysticism is rather an atmosphere than a system, if we except that anomalous school of scholastic mysticism represented in the twelfth century by Hugo de St. Victor, in the thirteenth by Bonaventura (one of whose works was translated into English verse as early as the year 1330), and by which, no doubt, San Juan de la Cruz strongly influenced. But apart from this school, and considering mysticism from a personal point of view, plainly belongs to that evasive part of a man's individuality that we confusedly call temperament, rather than to that more definite and self-determinative fraction we name character. Its very essence is undefinableness; it demands not an explanation but an interpretation.

it