e language of that great passion which, in its purest form, is the
best thing known to man and his highest glory. "I saw Him, and sought
Him, I had Him and I wanted Him." Could any words more completely
express the infinity of love's desire, ever unsatisfied even in
possession, than does this love-cry from the heart of Julian the
anchoress of Norwich?

The intensity and freshness of religious feeling of a mystical type in
England in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries are often
not realised, partly owing to the fact that much of the religious
writing of this time is still in manuscript. The country was full of
devotees who had taken religious vows, which they fulfilled either in
the many monasteries and convents, or often in single cells, as "hermit"
or "anchoress." Here they lived a life devoted to contemplation and
prayer, and to the spiritual assistance of those who sought them out.

The hermits, of whom there were a large number, were apparently free to
move from one neighbourhood to another, but the woman recluse, or
"anchoress," seldom or never left the walls of her cell, a little house
of two or three rooms built generally against the church wall, so that
one of her windows could open into the church, and another, veiled by a
curtain, looked on to the outer world, where she held converse with and
gave counsel to those who came to see her. Sometimes a little group of
recluses lived together, like those three sisters of Dorsetshire for
whom the _Ancren Riwle_ was written, a treatise which gives us so many
homely details of this type of life.

Richard Rolle (_c._ 1300-1349), of Hampole, near Doncaster, and the
Lady Julian, a Benedictine nun of Norwich (1342-_c._1413), are the two
most interesting examples of the mediaeval recluse in England. Both seem
to have had a singular charm of character and a purity of mystical
devotion which has impressed itself on their writings. Richard Rolle,
who entered upon a hermit's life at nineteen on leaving Oxford, had
great influence both through his life and work on the whole group of
fourteenth-century religious writers, and so on the thought of mediaeval
England. His contemporaries thought him mad, they jeered at him and
abused him, but he went quietly on his way, preaching and writing. Love
forced him to write; love, he said, gave him wisdom and subtlety, and he
preached a religion of love. Indeed the whole of his work is a symphony
of feeling, a song of Love, a