"While I was asleep," he says in one of his poems, 5 which runs thus in prose, "a dream came to me, which drew me readily to the desire of chastity. Two virgin forms, in white garments, seemed to shine close to me. Both were fair and of one age, and their ornament lay in their want of ornament, which is a woman's beauty. 10 No gold adorned their neck, nor jacinth; nor had they the delicate spinning of the silkworm. Their fair robe was bound with a girdle, and it reached down to their ankles. Their head and face were concealed by a veil, and their eyes were fixed on the ground. The fair glow 15 of modesty was on both of them, as far as could be seen under their thick covering. Their lips were closed in silence, as the rose in its dewy leaves. When I saw them, I rejoiced much; for I said that they were far more than mortals. And they in turn kept kissing me, 20 while I drew light from their lips, fondling me as a dear son. And when I asked who and whence the women were, the one answered, 'Purity,' the other, 'Sobriety'; 'We stand by Christ, the King, and delight in the beauty of the celestial virgins. Come, then, child, unite thy 25 mind to our mind, thy light to our light; so shall we carry thee aloft in all brightness through the air, and place thee by the radiance of the immortal Trinity.'" --_Carm._ p. 930. He goes on to say, that he never lost the 30 impression this made upon him, as "a spark of heavenly fire," or "a taste of divine milk and honey." As far, then, as these descriptions go, one might say that Gregory's abandonment of the world arose from an early passion, as it may be called, for a purity higher than his own nature; and Basil's, from a profound sense of the world's nothingness and the world's defilements. Both 5 seem to have viewed it as a sort of penitential exercise, as well as a means towards perfection.