How, then, have they done this? What is the general method by which any man communicates the result of his personal contacts with the universe to other minds? Roughly speaking, he has two ways of doing this, by description and by suggestion; and his best successes are those in which these two methods are combined. His descriptions are addressed to the intellect, his suggestions are appeals to the imagination, of those with whom he is trying to communicate. The necessities which control these two ways of telling the news—oblique suggestion and symbolic image—practically govern the whole of mystical literature. The span of this literature is wide. It goes from the utterly formless, yet infinitely suggestive, language of certain great contemplatives, to the crisply formal pictorial descriptions of those whose own revelations of Reality crystallize into visions, voices, or other psycho-sensorial experiences. At one end of the scale is the vivid, prismatic imagery of the Christian apocalypse, at the other the fluid, ecstatic poetry of some of the Sūfi saints. In his suggestive and allusive language the mystical artist often approaches the methods of music. When he does this, his statements do not give information. They operate a kind of enchantment which dilates the consciousness of the hearer to a point at which it is able to apprehend new aspects of the world. In his descriptive passages, on the other hand, he generally proceeds, as do nearly all our descriptive efforts, by way of comparison. Yet often these comparisons, like those employed by the great poet, are more valuable for their strange suggestive quality than for any exact parallels which they set up between the mystic’s universe and our own. Thus, when Clement of Alexandria compares the Logos to a “New Song,” when Suso calls the Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower,” when Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the Divine Dark which _is_ the Inaccessible Light, or Ruysbroeck of “the unwalled world,” we recognize a sudden flash of the creative imagination; evoking for us a truth far greater, deeper and more fruitful than the merely external parallel which it suggests. So too with many common metaphors of the mystics: the Fire of Love, the Game of Love, the Desert of God, the Marriage of the Soul. Such phrases succeed because of their interior and imaginative appeal. We have numerous examples of this kind of artistic language—the highly charged imaginative phrase—in the Bible; especially in the prophetic books, and the Apocalypse. Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. I will give thee treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places. The Lord shall be a diadem of beauty. He showed me a pure river of the water of life. I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters. I saw a new heaven and a new earth.