of Fran.
Studies, extra series, vol. i.

From these objective conditions which, whilst influencing Mechthild's
own thoughts and works, might and did, however differently, influence
the work of others as well, we turn to the consideration of her work
as the expression of her own poetic soul, welling up from depths
filled with love for the highest and most divine things. Before all
else we recognise how richly endowed she was with visionary powers and
poetic feeling. She revels in beautiful fantasies, as, for instance,
when she says, "If I were to speak one little word of the choirs of
heaven, it would be no more than the honey that a bee can carry away
on its feet from a full-blown flower." With rapture she touches upon
the deepest questions of the soul's life, and the highest truths and
mysteries of belief, so that in her flights of contemplation her prose
becomes poetry, impelled, like some torrent, by the rush of her
emotion.

O thou God, out-pouring in thy gift!
O thou God, o'erflowing in thy love!
O thou God, all burning in thy desire!
O thou God, melting in union with thy body!
O thou God, reposing on my breast!
Without Thee, never could I live.

But even so, she does not lose the sense of form or of the
picturesque. Some of her writings are clothed in language recalling
the Song of Songs, and are, perhaps, echoes of St. Bernard's sermons
on that wondrous allegory of the Spiritual Bridegroom and Bride, as
when, in a transport, and attempting to express how God comes to the
Soul, she exclaims--

I come to my Beloved
Like dew upon the flowers.

Others suggest reflections of courtly life and poetry, and at the same
time seem to anticipate pictures of the Celestial Garden, bright and
blossoming, where Saints tread in measured unison, symbolic of their
spiritual felicity and harmony. So with her didactic writings, or with
her predictions concerning the decay and corruption in the Church, in
which, like some prophet of old, she declaims against such evils in no
sparing terms, all alike are fraught with a special grace. In them all
the most intimate and the most sublime meet in one expression--the
expression of a soul which sees God in all things, and all things in
God.

During the thirty years which Mechthild spent as a beguine at
Magdeburg, she lived an austere life, and one beset with difficulties,
largely created by the fearless way in which she warned and denounced