Teresa thought that her _Mansions_ was one of her two best books, but she was surely far wrong in that. _The Mansions_, sometimes called _The Interior Castle_, to me at any rate, is a most shapeless, monotonous, and wearisome book. Teresa had a splendid imagination, but her imagination had not the architectonic and dramatic quality that is necessary for carrying out such a conception as that is which she has laid in the ground-plan of this book. No one who has ever read _The Purgatorio_ or _The Holy War_ could have patience with the shapeless and inconsequent _Mansions_. There is nothing that is new in the matter of the _Mansions_; there is nothing that is not found in a far better shape in some of her other books; and one is continually wearied out by her utter inability to handle the imagery which she will not let alone. At the same time, the persevering reader will come continually on characteristic things that are never to be forgotten as he climbs with Teresa from strength to strength on her way to her Father's House. To my mind Teresa is at her very best, not in her _Mansions_ which she made so much of, but in her _Letters_ which she made nothing of. I think I prefer her _Letters_ to all her other books. A great service was done to this fine field of literature when Teresa's letters were collected and published. What Augustine's editor has so well said about Augustine's letters I would borrow and would apply to Teresa's letters. All her other works receive fresh light from her letters. The subjects of her more elaborate writings are all handled in her letters in a far easier, a far more natural, and a far more attractive manner. It is in her letters that we first see the size and the strength and the sweep of her mind, and discover the deserved deference that is paid to her on all hands. Burdened churchmen, inquiring students in the spiritual life, perplexed confessors, angry and remonstrating monks, husbands and wives, matrons and maidens, all find their way to Mother Teresa. Great bundles of letters are delivered at the door of her cell every day, and she works at her answers to those letters till a bird begins to flutter in the top of her head, after which her physician will not suffer her to write more than twelve letters at a downsitting. And what letters they are, all sealed with the name of JESUS--she will seal now with no other seal. What letters of a strong and sound mind go out under that seal! What a business head! What shrewdness, sagacity, insight, frankness, boldness, archness, raillery, downright fun! And all as full of splendid sense as an egg is full of meat. If Andrew Bonar had only read Spanish, and had edited Teresa's _Letters_ as he has edited Rutherford's, we would have had that treasure in all our houses. As it is, Father Coleridge long ago fell on the happy idea of compiling a _Life of Teresa_ out of her extant letters, and he has at last carried out his idea, if not in all its