of his phrases float almost like transparent icicles on the colourless sea of silence, but still they exist; they have been separated from the waters, and that is sufficient. I am aware, finally, that the strange plants which he cultivated on the high peaks of the spirit are surrounded by clouds of their own, but these clouds annoy only gazers from below. Those who have the courage to climb see that they are the very atmosphere of these plants, the only atmosphere in which they can blossom in the shade of non-existence. For this is a vegetation so subtle that it can scarcely be distinguished from the silence from which it has drawn its juices and into which it seems ready to dissolve. This whole work, moreover, is like a magnifying glass turned upon darkness and silence; and sometimes we do not immediately discern the outline of the ideas which are still steeped therein. It is invisible things which appear from time to time, and some attention is obviously needed for their recognition. This book is not too far off from us; probably it is in the very centre of our humanity; it is we, on the contrary, who are too far from the book; and if it seems to us discouraging as the desert, if the desolation of divine love in it appears terrible, and the thirst on its summits unendurable, it is not that the book is too ancient, but that we ourselves are perhaps old and sad and lacking in courage, like gray-haired men in presence of a child. Plotinus, the great pagan mystic, is probably right when he says to those who complain that they see nothing on the heights of introspection: “We must first make the organ of vision analogous and similar to the object which it is to contemplate. The eye would never have perceived the sun, if it had not first taken the form of the sun; so likewise the soul could never see beauty if it did not first become beautiful itself; and all men should begin by making themselves beautiful and divine, in order that they may obtain the sight of the beautiful and of divinity.” II