Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/191

172 an ineffable glory whose true names are all only negative. Addressing the Eternal, the poet says: —


 * “Tu sine littore.
 * Tu sine tempore.”

Shoreless and timeless is the depth of true Being. Contrasting the present life with the perfect life, one has the wholly negative antithesis:


 * “Hic breve vivitur
 * Hic breve plangitur
 * Hic breve fletur;
 * Non breve vivere
 * Non breve plangere
 * Retribuetur.”

To be sure, Bernard’s hymn is a very treasure-house of brilliant sensuous characterizations of the joys of the home of peace; but just these characterizations, as we but now observed, are metaphorical, and are as such intended to be false. They hint at some final immediacy; and this justifies their use of sensuous language. They mean the ineffable, but their intended truth lies, above all, in the antitheses and in the negations that they merely illustrate: —


 * “Nescio, nescio
 * Quae jubilatio
 * Lux tibi qualis.”

The Nescio, nescio of Bernard, is identical in meaning with the Neti, Neti; it is not so; it is not so, of the sage Yâjnavalkya. In the very contrast of the finite with the ineffable this mysticism lives, whether it be Hindoo or Christian Mysticism: —