elody I took, with me dwelling
in mind. Forsooth my thought continually to mirth of song was
changed: and as it were the same that loving I had thought, and in
prayers and psalms had said, the same in sound I showed, and so
forth with [began] to sing that [which] before I had said, and from
plenitude of inward sweetness I burst forth, privily indeed, alone
before my Maker.[58]

The sweetness of this inward spiritual song is beyond any sound that may
be heard with bodily ears, even lovers can only catch snatches of it.
"Worldly lovers soothly words or ditties of our song may know, for the
words they read: but the tone and sweetness of that song they may not
learn."[59] The final stage of "sweetness" seems really to include the
other two, it is their completion and fruition. The first two, says
Rolle, are gained by devotion, and out of them springs the third.[60]
Rolle's description of it, of the all-pervading holy joy, rhythm, and
melody, when the soul, "now become as it were a living pipe," is caught
up into the music of the spheres, "and in the sight of God ... joying
sounds,"[61] deserves to be placed beside what is perhaps the most
magnificent passage in all mystical literature, where Plotinus tells us
of the choral dance of the soul about her God.[62]

Enough has been said to show that Rolle is a remarkable individual, and
one of the most poetic of the English religious mystical writers, and it
is regrettable that some of his other works are not more easily
accessible. Unfortunately, the poem with which his name is generally
associated, _The Pricke of Conscience_, is entirely unlike all his other
work, both in form and matter. It is a long, prosaic and entirely
unmystical homily in riming couplets, of a very ordinary mediaeval type,
stirring men's minds to the horrors of sin by dwelling on the pains of
purgatory and hell. It would seem almost certain, on internal evidence,
that the same hand cannot have written it and the _Fire of Love_, and
recent investigation appears to make it clear that Rolle's part in it,
if any, was merely of the nature of compilation or translation of some
other work, possibly by Grosseteste.[63]

Of the life of the Lady Julian we know very little, except that she was
almost certainly a Benedictine nun, and that she lived for many years in
an anchoress's cell close to the old church of St Julian at Conisford,
near Norwich. But her character and charm are fully