This soul then being thus mollified, softened and almost melted away in this love-full pain, was thereby extremely disposed to receive the impressions and marks of the love and pain of his sovereign lover; for his memory was wholly steeped in the remembrance of this divine love, his imagination forcibly applied to represent unto himself the wounds and livid bruises which his eyes then saw so perfectly expressed in the picture before him; the understanding received those most vivid images which the imagination furnished to it; and, finally, love employed all the forces of the will to enter into and conform itself to the passion of her well-beloved; whence without doubt the soul found herself transformed into a second crucified. Now the soul, as the form and mistress of the body, exercising her authority over it, impressed the pains of the wounds with which she was struck, on the parts corresponding to those wherein her beloved had endured them. Love is admirable in sharpening the imagination to penetrate to the exterior. In Laban's ewes the imagination had a corporal effect upon the lambs, and the imagination of human mothers affects their children. A strong imagination makes a man become grey in one night, and disturbs his health and all his humours. Love then drove the interior torment of this great lover S. Francis to the exterior, and wounded the body with the same dart of pain with which it had wounded the heart; but love being within could not well make the holes in the flesh without, and therefore the burning seraph coming to its help, darted rays of so penetrating a light, that it really made in the flesh the exterior wounds of the crucified, which love had imprinted interiorly in the soul. So the seraph seeing that Isaias did not dare to speak, because he perceived his lips defiled, came in the name of God to touch and purify his lips with a burning coal taken from off the altar, seconding in this sort his desire. The myrrh tree brings forth its gum and first liquor by way of sweat and transpiration, but that it may let out all its juice, it must be helped by incision. In the same way the divine love of S. Francis appeared in his whole life, after the manner of a sweating, for in all his actions he showed nothing but this sacred affection; but to make the incomparable abundance of it plainly appear, the divine seraph came to make the incision and wounds. And to the end it might be known that these wounds were wounds of Heaven's love, they were made not with the steel, but with rays of light. O true God! Theotimus, what amorous dolours and dolorous loves! For not only at that instant, but also his whole life after, this poor Saint went pining and languishing, as sick with very love.