A place of rest! Yes, in that one word REST lies all the longing of the mystic. Every creature in heaven above, and in the earth beneath, saith Master Eckart, all things in the height and all things in the depth, have one yearning, one ceaseless, unfathomable desire, one voice of aspiration: it is for rest; and again, for rest; and ever, till the end of time, for rest! The mystics have constituted themselves the interpreters of these sighs and groans of the travailing creation; they are the hierophants to gather, and express, and offer them to heaven; they are the teachers to weary, weeping men of the way whereby they may attain, even on this side the grave, a serenity like that of heaven. What the halcyon of fable is among the birds, that are the mystics among their kind. They essay to build them a marvellous nest, which not only floats upon the waves of life, but has the property of charming those waves to a glassy stillness, so that in mid-winter, and the very heart of storms, their souls enjoy, for a season, what the ancients called ‘the halcyon days,’—that wondrous week of calm ordained for the favoured bird when the year is roughest. ’Tis pity, murmurs old Montaigne, that more information hath not come down to us concerning the construction of these nests. Tradition has it, that the halcyon first of all fashions the said nest by interlacing the bones of some fish. When it is put together she takes it, like a boat ready for launching, and lays it on the beach: the waves come up: they lift it: they let it fall: they toss it gently among the rocks and pebbles; what is faultily made their play breaks, or makes to gape, so that the bird discovers the weak places, and what parts must be more duly finished; what is well knit together already, their strokes only season and confirm. Now when we read the lives of the mystics—each of whom has a method, more or less his own, of weaving such a nest, in other words, his _Theory and Practice of Quietude_—we see the structure on trial. Experience, with its buffeting, tests each man’s method for the attainment of Rest. If we watch carefully, we shall see that some things in the doctrine of many of them break away under trial, while others are rendered only more compact and buoyant thereby. The examination of the appliances and the processes adopted by these searchers after the Divine Stillness, ought to be very helpful to ourselves. As far as we have their history before us, we can try them by their fruits. We ask, in the case of one man, by what divine art was it that his ark was so skilfully framed as to out-ride those deluges of trouble as though they had been the waters of some windless mere? We ask, in the case of another, by what fault came it in the structure of his sailing nest, that the waters entered, and he sank, or seemed to sink, finding not the rest of soul he sought, but the vexation of soul he fled? We ask, in the several most signal examples of the