In the writings of Richard, as compared with those of Hugo, I find that what belongs to the schoolman has received a more elaborate and complex development, while what belongs to the mystic has also attained an ampler and more prolific growth. All the art of the scholastic is there—the endless ramification and subdivision of minute distinctions; all the intellectual fortification of the time—the redoubts, ravelins, counterscarps, and bastions of dry, stern logic; and among these, within their lines and at last above them all, is seen an almost oriental luxuriance of fancy and of rhetoric—palm and pomegranate, sycamore and cypress, solemn cedar shadows, the gloom in the abysses of the soul,—luscious fruit and fragrant flowers, the triumphs of its ecstasy, all blissful with the bloom and odours of the upper Paradise. He is a master alike in the serviceable science of self-scrutiny, and in the imaginary one of self-transcendence. His works afford a notable example of that fantastic use of Scripture prevalent throughout the Middle Age. His psychology, his metaphysics, his theology, are all extracted from the most unlikely quarters in the Bible by allegorical interpretation. Every logical abstraction is attached to some personage or object in the Old Testament history, as its authority and type. Rachel and Leah are Reason and Affection. Bilhah and Zilpah are Imagination and Sense. His divinity is embroidered on the garments of Aaron, engraven on the sides of the ark, hung on the pins and rings of the tabernacle. His definitions and his fancies build in the eaves of Solomon’s temple, and make their ‘pendent bed and procreant cradle’ in the carved work of the holy place. To follow the thread of his religious philosophy, you have to pursue his agile and discursive thoughts, as the sparrow-hawk the sparrow, between the capitals, among the cedar rafters, over the gilded roof, from court to court, column to column, and sometimes after all the chase is vain, for they have escaped into the bosom of a cloud.[67]