convent is held holy and honoured; "Bounty"
is the cellaress; "Mercy" the stewardess; and "Pity" the sick-nurse.
The provost, or priest, is "Godly Obedience," to whom all these
virtues are subject. "Thus does the convent abide in God, and happy
are they who dwell therein."

From this spiritual abode of the virtues we turn to one of Mechthild's
earliest recorded visions--that of Hell, with its flame and flare.
Whilst Death was perhaps man's first mystery, the Hereafter has been
his endless pre-occupation. Whatever his country or his time, he has
ever sought to lift the veil which hides the future, portraying his
vain efforts in symbol. In Mechthild's time her world was engrossed
with thoughts and speculations concerning the Hereafter, for Death,
which at the end of the next century was to take dramatic and
pictorial form in the weird and all-embracing "Dance of Death,"
although its earliest known poetic form is of 1160, ever hovered near
in pestilence, war, and tumult. Whilst some expressed themselves in
carved stone, or on painted wall, others, as did Mechthild, realised
their visions and ideas in a wealth of word-pictures. Such visions
and ideas had accumulated adown the ages, varying but slightly one
from another, and Mechthild, in making use of this stereotyped
material, only took from, or added to, the general sum. Yet even so,
she contrives to make her personality felt. She begins: "I have seen a
place whose name is Eternal Hatred." Lucifer, farthest removed from
the source of Light, forms the foundation-stone, and around him are
arranged the deadly sins. Above him are the Christians, then the Jews,
and, farthest removed from Hell's dire depths, the Heathen. Horror
upon horror follows, like those pictured a hundred years before by
Herrad von Landsperg, abbess at Hohenburg, in Alsace, and, fifty years
later, by Dante, and when she concludes by saying that, after seeing
the terrors of Hell, all her five senses were paralysed for three
days, as if struck by lightning, it is significant that Dante tells
that, overwhelmed with sorrow for the lovers, doomed for ever to be
borne upon the winds, he "fainted with pity ... and fell, as a dead
body falls."

It is with a sense of relief that we leave such sad scenes, to glance
at her vision of Paradise, although it does not follow in this
sequence in her recorded revelations, for, as seems fitting, it is one
of the very latest. Calling it "a glimpse of Paradise," she says t