ATHERTON. It then becomes the favourite employment of the monk to detect this hidden meaning, and to make Scripture render to tradition the same service which the mask rendered to the ancient actor, not only disguising the face, but making the words go farther. To be thus busied was to secure two advantages at once; he had occupation for his leisure, and an answer for his adversaries. CHAPTER V. Oh! contemplation palls upon the spirit, Like the chill silence of an autumn sun: While action, like the roaring south-west wind, Sweeps, laden with elixirs, with rich draughts Quickening the wombed earth. _Guta._ And yet what bliss, When, dying in the darkness of God’s light, The soul can pierce these blinding webs of nature, And float up to the nothing, which is all things— The ground of being, where self-forgetful silence Is emptiness,—emptiness fulness,—fulness God,— Till we touch Him, and, like a snow-flake, melt Upon his light-sphere’s keen circumference! THE SAINT’S TRAGEDY. GOWER. Thanks, if you please, not reproaches. I was calling help for you, I was summoning the fay to your assistance, to determine the best possible order of your mystics. WILLOUGHBY. The fay? GOWER. The fay. Down with you in that arm-chair, and sit quietly. Know that I was this morning reading Andersen’s Märchen—all about Ole-Luk-Oie, his ways and works—the queer little elf. Upstairs he creeps, in houses where children are, softly, softly, in the dusk of the evening, with what do you think under his arm?—two umbrellas, one plain, the other covered with gay colours and quaint figures. He makes the eyes of the children heavy, and when they are put to bed, holds over the heads of the good children the painted umbrella, which causes them to dream the sweetest and most wonderful dreams imaginable; but over the naughty children he holds the other, and they do not dream at all. Now, thought I, let me emulate the profundity of a German critic. Is this to be treated as a simple child’s tale? Far from it. There is a depth of philosophic meaning in it. Have not the mystics been mostly childlike natures? Have not their lives been full of dreams, manifold and strange—and they therefore, if any, especial favourites of Ole-Luk-Oie? They have accounted their dreams their pride and their reward. They have looked on the sobriety of dreamlessness as the appropriate deprivation of privilege consequent on carnality and ignorance; in other words, the non-dreamers have been with them the naughty children. To learn life’s lessons well is, according to them, to enjoy as a recompence the faculty of seeing visions and of dreaming dreams. Here then is the _idea_ of mysticism. You have its myth, its legend. Ole-Luk-Oie is its presiding genius.