[22] Cf. Edmund G. Gardner, _Joachim of Flora and the Everlasting Gospel_. Franciscan Essays, Bri. Soc. 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.