So much for the poets. In the prose writings of the mystics we find again the same characters, the same high imaginative qualities, the same passionate effort to give the ineffable some kind of artistic form. This effort includes in its span a wide range of literary artifices; some endeavouring to recapture and represent in concrete symbols the objective reality known; some, like one dominant art movement of the present day, trying to communicate it obliquely, by a representation of the subjective feeling-state induced in the mystic’s own consciousness. At one end of the scale, therefore, we have the so-called negative language of mysticism, which describes the supersensuous in paradox by refusing to describe it at all; by declaring that the entry of the soul upon spiritual experience is an entry into a Cloud of Unknowing, a nothing, a Divine Darkness, a fathomless abyss. The curious thing is, that though here, if anywhere, the mystic seems to keep his secret to himself, as a matter of fact it is just this sort of language which has been proved to possess the highest evocative power. For many types of mind, this really does fling magic casements wide; does give us a momentary glimpse of the perilous seas. I am inclined to think that, many and beautiful as are the symbolic and pictorial creations of mystical genius, it is here that this genius works most freely, produces its most magnificent results. When Ruysbroeck speaks of the boundless abyss of pure simplicity, that “dim silence where all lovers lose themselves”; when he assures us that, “stripped of its very life,” the soul is destined to “sail the wild billows of that Sea Divine,” surely he effects a true change in our universe. So, too, the wonderful series of formless visions—though “vision” is a poor word for intuitive experience of this sort—experienced by Angela of Foligno, far exceed in their suggestive power her vividly pictured conversations with Christ, when she declares that she beheld “those eyes and that face so gracious and so pleasing.” “I beheld,” she says of her ultimate experience of the Absolute, “a Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save what I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And though my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that ineffable Thing it was itself filled with unutterable joy, and it was taken out of the state it was in, and placed in this great and ineffable state.... But if thou seekest to know that which I beheld, I can tell thee nothing, save that I beheld a Fullness and a Clearness, and felt them within me so abundantly that I cannot describe it, nor give any image thereof: for what I beheld was not bodily, but as though it were in heaven. Thus I beheld a beauty so great that I can say nothing of it save that I saw the Supreme Beauty, which contains in itself all goodness.”