had addressed her in speech; she took it not merely as _having_ a
meaning, but as designed and uttered to _convey_ a meaning--for to speak
is more than to let one's mind appear. Or again, it is by bodily vision
she sees a little hasel-nut in her hand, symbolic of the "naughting of
all that is made." Of words formed in her imagination she tells us, for
example, "Then He (i.e., Christ as seen on the crucifix) without voice
and opening of lips formed in my soul these words: _Herewith is the
fiend overcome_." Of "ghostly sight," or spiritual intuition, we have an
instance when she says: "In the same time that I saw (i.e., visually)
this sight of the Head bleeding, our good Lord showed a ghostly sight of
His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is comfortable
to our help; He is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us," &c.--where,
in her own words and imagery, she is describing a divine-given insight
into the relation of God and the soul. Or again, when she is shown our
Blessed Lady, it is no pictorial or bodily presentment, "but the virtues
of her blissful soul, her truth, her wisdom, her charity." "And Jesus
... showed me a _ghostly_ sight of her, right as I had seen her before,
little and simple and pleasing to Him above all creatures."

Just as in the setting forth of these spiritual apprehensions, the words
and imagery are usually her own, so in the description of bodily vision
she uses her own language and comparisons. For example, the following
realism: "The great drops of blood fell down from under the garland like
pellets, seeming as it had come out of the veins; and in coming out they
were brown red, for the Blood was full thick, and in spreading abroad
they were bright red.... The plenteousness is like to drops of water
that fall off the eavings after a great shower of rain.... And for
roundness they were like to the scales of herrings in the spreading of
the forehead," &c. These similes, she tells us, "came to my mind in the
time." In other instances, the comparisons and illustrations of what she