[157]. Why smite thy breast and lament? why not lift up thy soul? why meditate for ever on the sign? He thou lovest is within thee. Thou seekest Jesus—thou hast him; he is found, and thou perceivest it not. Why these groans, this weeping? The true joy is thine; hidden within thee, though thou knowest it not, lies the solace of thine anguish; thou hast within, thou seekest without, the cure for thy languishing soul.
[158]. I live, but with no life of mine, and long towards a life so high—I die because I do not die.
[159]. The Life of Suso, published in Diepenbrock’s edition of his works, was written by his spiritual daughter, Elsbet Stäglin, according to the account she received at various intervals from his own lips. He sprang from a good family,—his name, originally Heinrich vom Berg. The name of Suso he adopted from his mother, a woman remarkable for her devotion. The secret name of Amandus, concealed till after his death, was supposed to have been conferred by the Everlasting Wisdom himself on his beloved servant.
The incident of the rescue of himself and his book from the floods, by the timely intervention of a knight passing that way, is related in the twenty-ninth chapter of the Life, p. 68.
[160]. Heinrich Suso’s Leben und Schriften, von M. Diepenbrock (1837), pp. 15, 51, 86. Diepenbrock’s book is an edition of the biography by Stäglin, and of the Book of the Everlasting Wisdom, &c., from the oldest manuscripts and editions, and rendered into modern German.
[161]. Leben, cap. 48,—where it is also said that, on one occasion, as ‘the servant was preaching at Cologne, one of his auditors beheld his face luminous with a supernatural effulgence.’ It is known that Tauler possessed a copy of the Horologium Sapientiæ.
See also Schmidt’s Tauler, p. 169. Comp. Leben, cap. xxxi. p. 72, and cap. xlix.
[162]. Leben, cap. iv.
[163]. Leben, cap. xvii.-xx. Suso died in 1385 at Ulm; he was born about the commencement of the century.
[164]. Suso sent a Latin version of the book of the Everlasting Wisdom, under the title Horologium Sapientiæ, to Hugo von Vaucemain, Master of the Order, for his approval. The date of the work is fixed between 1333 and 1342. The prologue contains the account of the ‘inspiratio superna’ under which the work was written.—(Diepenb. Vorbericht, p. 6.) It was translated ere long into French, Dutch, and English, and appears to have been in the fourteenth century almost what the Imitatio Christi became in the fifteenth.—Ibid., p. 15.