7. The Seven Cloisters (_De Septem_ _Custodiis_).—This was written before 1363, and preserves its address to ‘The Holy Nun, Dame Margaret van Meerbeke, Cantor of the Monastery of St. Clare at Brussels.’ The novice of the ‘Mirror’ is now a professed religious; and her director instructs her upon the attitude of mind which she should bring to the routine duties of a nun’s day, the opportunity they offer for the enriching and perfecting of love and humility. He describes the education of the human spirit up to that high point of consciousness where it knows itself established ‘between Eternity and Time’: one of the fundamental thoughts of Flemish and German mysticism. This education admits her successively into the seven cloisters which kept St. Clare, Foundress of the Order, unspotted from the world. The first is the physical enclosure of the convent walls; the next the moral and volitional limitation of self-control. The third is ‘the open door of the love of Christ,’ which crowns man’s affective powers, and leads to the fourth—total dedication of the will. The fifth and sixth represent the two great forms of the Contemplative Life as conceived by Ruysbroeck: the ecstatic and the deiform. The seventh admits to Abyss of Being itself: that ‘dim silence’ at the heart of which, as in the Seventh Habitation of St. Teresa’s ‘Interior Castle,’ he will find himself alone with God. There the mystic union is consummated, and the Divine activity takes the place of the separate activity of man, in “a simple beatitude which transcends all sanctity and the practice of virtue, an Eternal Fruition which satisfies all hunger and thirst, all love and all craving, for God.” Finally, he returns to the Active Life; and ends with a practical chapter on clothes, and a charming instruction, full of deep poetry, on the evening meditation which should close the day.