It is probably a true tradition which represents him as having written his greatest and most inspired pages sitting under a favourite tree in the depths of the woods. When the ‘Spirit’ came on him, as it often did with a startling suddenness, he would go away into the forest carrying his tablet and stylus. There, given over to an ecstasy of composition—which seems often to have approached the limits of automatic writing, as in St. Teresa, Boehme, Blake and other mystics—he would write that which was given to him, without addition or omission; breaking off even in the middle of a sentence when the ‘Spirit’ abruptly departed, and resuming at the same point, though sometimes after an interval which lasted several weeks, when it returned. In his last years, when eyesight failed him, he would allow a younger brother to go with him into the woods, and there to take down from dictation the fruits of those meditations in which he ‘saw without sight’; as the illiterate Catherine of Siena dictated in ecstasy the text of her Divine Dialogue. Two witnesses have preserved Ruysbroeck’s solemn affirmation, given first to his disciple Gerard Groot ‘in great gentleness and humility,’ and repeated again upon his death-bed in the presence of the whole community, that every word of his writings was thus composed under the immediate domination of an inspiring power; that ‘secondary personality of a superior type,’ in touch with levels of reality beyond the span of the surface consciousness, which governs the activities of the great mystics in their last phases of development. These books are not the fruit of conscious thought, but ‘God-sent truths,’ poured out from a heart immersed in that Divine Abyss of which he tries to tell.