Meanwhile he did not discontinue his literary work, and as a man of letters no less than as a theologian and a reformer, Ruysbroek deserves to be studied. Writing in prose and in the vulgar tongue, he addressed himself in the first place to the people, for the art of reading was at this time sufficiently widespread, but in what he wrote there was no tinge of grossness or sensuality. His mystical treatises breathe the spirit of the _Imitation of Christ_, of which indeed they may be said to be the prototype, and by reason of the loftiness of his sentiments and the purity and the beauty of the language in which they are expressed he merits to be placed in the first rank of the spiritual writers of the Middle Age. He himself used so say that he wrote under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and a story related by his biographer and disciple, Hendrick Bogaerden, goes to show that at least in his own cloister such was believed to be the case. [Illustration: Rouge Cloître] It was Ruysbroek's custom to write as he walked in the forest, and one day having prolonged his ramble beyond his wont, the monks grew alarmed and dispatched one of their number to search for him, and presently this man discovered the Prior of Groenendael. He was seated beneath a linden tree with his tablets in his hand, and he was surrounded with rays of light. Perhaps the sun had suddenly pierced through a dark cloud, but the picture is none the less a pleasing one, and it shows in what estimation Jan Ruysbroek was held by his spiritual sons. Nor was it only in his own cloister or in his native land that Ruysbroek was regarded as a saint. In Germany, in Flanders, in Holland, wherever his books were read, his name was held in veneration, and Groenendael was constantly besieged by pilgrims, many of them from distant lands, who had come there for no other reason than to hold converse with its prior. Nor was his head turned by so much adulation. To the end of his days he remained the humble, gentle, unassuming priest he had been in the days when he was an unknown Brussels curate, and it was ever his delight to perform the most menial offices in his priory. He died on the night of the 2nd of December 1381, in the eighty-ninth year of his age, and 'on that night,' note the chroniclers of Groenendael, 'the bells of the Church of Deventer, where dwelt his friend Geert Groote, were solemnly tolled for him by invisible hands, and another friend and disciple, the Dean of Saint Sulpice at Diest, dreamed that his soul had passed from this world, and after remaining in purgatory half an hour, was carried by angels to heaven'; and they also tell us that fifty years after his death, his body having been disinterred, was found to be still incorrupt, and that it was exposed in the cloister of Groenendael for three days and seen by thousands of people. Strange stories these, typical of the age in which they were first told.