the same time
practical, natural, and sensitive; and my own experience proves it to me
that there exists no one who loves her but would, if the saint were still
in this world, travel far to see and speak with her.' I wish much I
could add to that Peter of Alcantara's marvellous analysis of Teresa's
experiences and character. Under thirty-three heads that great saint
sums up Teresa's character, and gives us a noble, because all
unconscious, revelation of his own. And though Teresa has been dead for
three hundred years, she speaks to this day in that same way: and that
too in quarters in which we would little expect to hear her voice. In
that intensely interesting novel of modern Parisian life, _En Route_,
Teresa takes a chief part in the conversion and sanctification of the
prodigal son whose return to his father's house is so powerfully depicted
in that story. The deeply read and eloquent author of that remarkable
book gives us some of the best estimates and descriptions of Santa Teresa
that I have anywhere met with. 'That cool-headed business woman . . .
that admirable psychologist and of superhuman lucidity . . . that
magnificent and over-awing saint . . . she has verified in her own case
the supernatural experiences of the greatest mystics,--such are her
unparalleled experiences in the supernatural domain. . . . Teresa goes
deeper than any like writer into the unexplored regions of the soul. She
is the geographer and hydrographer of the sinful soul. She has drawn the
map of its poles, marked its latitudes of contemplation and prayer, and
laid out all the interior seas and lands of the human heart. Other
saints have been among those heights and depths and deserts before her,
but no one has left us so methodical and so scientific a survey.' Were
it for nothing else, the chapters on mystical literature in M. Huysmans'
unfinished trilogy would make it a valued possession to every student of
the soul of man under sin and under salvation. I await the completion of
his Pilgrim's Progress with great impatience and with great expectation.

And then, absolutely possessed as Teresa always is by the most solemn
subjects,--herself, her sin, her Saviour, her original method of prayer
and her unshared experiences in prayer,--she showers upon us continually
gleams and glances of the sunniest merriment, amid all her sighs and
tears. She roasts in caustic the gross-minded, and the self-satisfied,
and the self-righteous, as