I have translated this book, then, solely because I believe that the writings of the mystics are the purest diamonds in the vast treasure of humanity. A translation may indeed very easily be useless, for experience seems to prove that it matters little whether the mystery of the incarnation of a thought takes place in darkness or in light; it is enough that it has taken place. But, however this may be, the truths of mysticism have a strange privilege over ordinary truths; they can neither grow old nor die. There is no truth which did not, one morning, come down upon this world, lovely in strength and in youth, and covered with the fresh and wondrous dew which lies on things yet unspoken: to-day you may pass through the infirmaries of the human soul, where all thoughts come day by day to die, and you will not find there a single mystic thought. They have the immunity of the angels of Swedenborg, who progress continually towards the spring of their youth, so that the oldest angels appear the youngest; and whether they come from India, from Greece, or from the North, they have neither country nor date, and wherever we meet them, they are calm and real as God Himself. A work grows old in exact proportion to its anti-mysticism; and that is why this book bears no date. I know that it is unusually obscure, but I believe that a sincere and honest author is never obscure in the eternal sense of the word, because he always understands himself, and in a way which is infinitely beyond anything that he says. It is only artificial ideas which spring up in real darkness, and flourish solely in literary epochs and in the insincerity of self-conscious ages, when the thought of the writer is poorer than his expression. In the former case, we have the rich shade of a forest; in the latter, the gloom of a cavern, in which only dismal parasites can grow. We must take into account that unknown world which our author’s phrases were meant to enlighten through the poor double horn-panes of words and thoughts. Words, as it has been said, were invented for the ordinary uses of life, and they are unhappy, restless, and as bewildered as beggars round a throne, when, from time to time, some royal soul leads them elsewhere. And, from another point of view, is the thought ever the exact image of that unknown thing which gave it birth? Do we not always behold in it the shadow of a conflict like that of Jacob with the angel, confused in proportion to the stature of the soul and of the angel? “Woe to us,” says Carlyle, “if we have nothing in us except that which we can express and show to others.” I know that on these pages there lies the shadow cast from objects which we have no recollection of having seen. The monk does not stop to explain their use to us, and we shall recognise them only when we behold the objects themselves on the other side of this life; but meanwhile, he has made us look into the distance, and that is much. I know, besides, that many