It remains now to say a word about the different translations of Ruysbroeck’s work. Twenty years ago, Ernest Hello, who, with Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé, is the greatest French mystic of our time, published a brief volume in which he collected under headings, chosen mostly as his fancy dictated, various passages of our author, translated from a Latin translation written in the sixteenth century by Laurentius Surius, a Carthusian monk of Cologne. This translation of Surius, noble and subtle in its Latinity, gives with strict and admirable care the sense of the original; but with its over-anxiety, its prolixity, and its weakness, it resembles, when we contrast with it the crude colours of the original Flemish, some distant image seen through sullied panes. When his author uses one word, Surius generally employs two or three, and even then, still dissatisfied, he very often paraphrases once more that which he has already translated in full. The hermit utters cries of love so passionate that they are sometimes almost like blasphemies; Surius is frightened as he reads them and sets down something different. There are times when the old hermit looks outside himself, and in speaking of God searches for images drawn from the garden, the kitchen, or from the stars. Surius does not always venture to follow these flights, and he tries to weaken the meaning or flatters himself that he is ennobling it. “He escapes me like a truant,” says one of the Flemish Beguines in speaking of Jesus, and others add:-- “Christ and I keep house together, He is mine, I His; Night and day His love outwears me; He my heart hath stolen; In His mouth He holds me, What care have I outside!” Elsewhere God says to man:-- “I will be thy nourishment, Thy host and thy cook. My flesh was well roasted On the cross for love of thee. Shalt eat and drink with Me.” The translator is terrified and changes these astonishing flights into pale circumlocutions. The wild and simple air, the vast and savage love of the original work, most frequently disappear in a wise, correct, copious, and monotonous conventual phraseology; the fidelity to the meaning remaining all the while exact. It was fragments of this translation which Ernest Hello translated in his turn, or rather, he gathered together in chapters arranged by himself, phrases taken from different portions of the work, and disfigured by a double translation. He thus formed a kind of anthology, admirable in its way, almost entirely consecutive; but in which, in spite of careful searching, I have been unable to find more than three or four passages reproduced in their entirety.