The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, “How the soul, by holy self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable and indescribable state,” contains again numerous touches which have been assimilated by Catherine. So with: “Drawn forth, out of her natural state, into that unmeasurable condition whither love goes to drown itself, the soul, having plunged into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find, on any side, any means of issuing forth from it,” vv. 12, 13. So also with: “Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that Goodness … it has become necessary for thee again to love thyself, but with His Love,--into so great an unity hast thou been drawn by Him,” vv. 52-54. So too with: “All Faith ceases for the soul to whom it has been given to see; and all Hope, since it now actually holds what it used to seek,” v. 70, although this is more absolute than are her similar utterances.--But especially are the startling words interesting: “In this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other drinketh thee (_tu bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione_),” v. 98, which, in their second part, are identical with R. Browning’s “My end, to slake Thy thirst”:[111] for they will have helped to support or to encourage Catherine’s corresponding inversion--the teaching of an eating, an assimilation, not of God by man, but of man by God. Both sets of images go back, of course, to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the God-man Christ, under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk. The striking Loda LXXXX, “How the soul arrives at a treble state of annihilation,” has doubtless suggested much to Catherine. “He who has become the very Cause of all things” (_chi è cosa d’ogni cosa_) “can never more desire anything,” v. 4, is, it is true, more daring, because more quietly explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has been echoed by her throughout: “The heavens have grown stagnant; their silence constrains me to cry aloud: ‘O profound Ocean, the very depth of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and drown myself within it,’”--where note the interestingly antique presupposition of the music of the spheres, which has now stopped, and of the watery constitution of the crystalline heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity of the change in the impressions,--from immobility to silence, and from air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air as of water, and as little the one as the other; and its attractive force is still that innate affinity between the river-soul and its living Source and Home, the Ocean God, which we have so constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius. “The land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one of promise only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land. Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,” v. 18, has, in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching, found the noblest response and re-utterance in and by Catherine’s words and life.