ATHERTON. I will describe it as well as I can. It was the interior of a Spanish cathedral. The most prominent object in the foreground below was the mighty foot of a staircase, with a balustrade of exceeding richness, which, in its ascent, crosses and recrosses the picture till its highest flight is lost in darkness,—for on that side the cathedral is built against a hill. A half-light slanted down—a sunbeam through the vast misty space—from a window without the range of the picture. At various stages of the mounting stairway figures on pillars, bearing escutcheons, saints and kings in fretted niches, and painted shapes of gules and azure from the lofty window in the east, looked down on those who were ascending, some in brightness, some in shadow. At the foot of the stairs were two couchant griffins of stone, with expanded spiny wings, arched necks fluted with horny armour, and open threatening jaws. GOWER. Now for the interpretation of your parable in stone. ATHERTON. It represented to me the mystic’s progress—my mind was full of that—his initiation, his ascent, his consummation in self-loss. First of all the aspirant, whether he seeks superhuman knowledge or superhuman love, is confronted at the outset by terrible shapes—the Dwellers of the Threshold, whether the cruelty of asceticism, the temptations of the adversary, or the phantoms of his own feverish brain. This fiery baptism manfully endured, he begins to mount through alternate glooms and illuminations; now catching a light from some source beyond the grosser organs of ordinary men, again in darkness and barren drought of soul. The saintly memories of adepts and of heroes in these mystic labours are the faithful witnesses that cheer him at each stage, whose far glories beacon him from their place of high degree as he rises step by step. Are not those first trials fairly symbolized by my griffins, those vicissitudes of the soul by such light and shadow, and those exalted spectators by the statues of my stairway and the shining ones of my oriel window? Then for the climax. The aim of the mystic, if of the most abstract contemplative type, is to lose himself in the Divine Dark[3]—to escape from everything definite, everything palpable, everything human, into the Infinite Fulness; which is, at the same time, the ‘intense inane.’ The profoundest obscurity is his highest glory; he culminates in darkness; for is not the deathlike midnight slumber of the sense, he will ask us, the wakeful noonday of the spirit? So, as I looked on the picture, I seemed to lose sight of him where the summit of the stair was lost among the shadows crouched under the roof of that strange structure. GOWER. I perceive the analogy. I owe you thanks for enabling me to attach at least some definite idea to the word mysticism. I confess I have generally used the term mystical to designate anything fantastically unintelligible, without giving to it any distinct significance.