MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG 



ably from the Dominicans, who found special 

 favour in her sight, anM that they greatly 

 influenced her own prophetic warnings to the 

 Church. 



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 thott 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, 



65 F 



