Chapter II

Love and Beauty Mystics

In studying the mysticism of the English writers, and more especially of the poets, one is at once struck by the diversity of approach leading to unity of end.

"There are," says Plotinus, "different roads by which this end [apprehension of the Infinite] may be reached. The love of beauty, which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One and that ascent of science which makes the ambition of the philosopher; and that love and those prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity towards perfection. These are the great highways conducting to that height above the actual and the particular, where we stand in the immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from the deeps of the soul."—Letter to Flaccus.

We have grouped together our English writers who are mystical in thought, according to the five main pathways by which they have seen the Vision: Love, Beauty, Nature, Wisdom, or Devotion. Even within these groups, the method of approach, the interpretation or application of the Idea, often differs very greatly. For instance, Shelley and Browning may both be called love-mystics; that is, they look upon love as the solution of the mystery of life, as the link between God and man. To Shelley this was a glorious intuition, which reached him through his imagination, whereas the life of man as he saw it roused in him little but mad indignation, wild revolt, and passionate protest. To Browning this was knowledge—knowledge borne in upon him just because of human life as he saw it, which to him was a clear proof of the great destiny of the race. He would have agreed with Patmore that "you can see the disc of Divinity quite clearly through the smoked glass of humanity, but no otherwise." He found "harmony in immortal souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay."

The three great English poets who are also fundamentally mystical in thought are Browning, Wordsworth, and Blake. Their philosophy or mystical belief, one in essence, though so differently expressed, lies at the root, as it is also the flower, of their life-work. In others, as in Shelley, Keats, and Rossetti, although it is the inspiring force of their poetry, it is not a flame, burning steadily and evenly, but rather a light flashing out intermittently into brilliant and dazzling radiance. Hence the man himself is not so permeated by it; and hence results the unsatisfied desire, the almost painful yearning, the recurring disappointment and disillusionment, which we do not find in Browning, Wordsworth, and Blake.

In our first group we have four poets of markedly different temperaments—Shelley intensely spiritual; Rossetti with a strong tinge of sensuousness, of "earthiness" in his nature; Browning, the keenly intellectual man of the world, and Patmore a curious mixture of materialist and mystic; yet to all four love is the secret of life, the one thing worth giving and possessing.

Shelley believed in a Soul of the Universe, a Spirit in which all things live and move and have their being; which, as one feels in the Prometheus, is unnamable, inconceivable even to man, for "the deep truth is imageless." His most passionate desire was not, as was Browning's, for an increased and ennobled individuality, but for the mystical fusion of his own personality with this Spirit, this object of his worship and adoration. To Shelley, death itself was but the rending of a veil which would admit us to the full vision of the ideal, which alone is true life. The sense of unity in all things is most strongly felt in Adonais, where Shelley's maturest thought and philosophy are to be found; and indeed the mystical fervour in this poem, especially towards the end, is greater than anywhere else in his writings. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is in some ways Shelley's clearest and most obvious expression of his devotion to the Spirit of Ideal Beauty, its reality to him, and his vow of dedication to its service. But the Prometheus is the most deeply mystical of his poems; indeed, as Mrs Shelley says, "it requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as Shelley's own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem."

Shelley, like Blake, regarded the human imagination as a divine creative force; Prometheus stands for the human imagination, or the genius of the world; and it is his union with Asia, the divine Idea, the Spirit of Beauty and of Love, from which a new universe is born. It is this union, which consummates the aspirations of humanity, that Shelley celebrates in the marvellous love-song of Prometheus. As befitted a disciple of Godwin, he believed in the divine potentiality of man, convinced that all good is to be found within man's own being, and that his progress depends on his own will.

It is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill—
We might be otherwise—we might be all
We dream of happy, high, majestical.
Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek
But in our mind?

Julian and Maddalo.

In the allegorical introduction to the Revolt of Islam, which is an interesting example of Shelley's mystical mythology, we have an insight into the poet's view of the good power in the world. It is not an almighty creator standing outside mankind, but a power which suffers and rebels and evolves, and is, in fact, incarnate in humanity, so that it is unrecognised by men, and indeed confounded with evil:—

And the Great Spirit of Good did creep among
The nations of mankind, and every tongue
Cursed and blasphemed him as he passed, for none
Knew good from evil.

There is no doubt that to Shelley the form assumed by the divine in man was love. Mrs Shelley, in her note to Rosalind and Helen, says that, "in his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness or insensibility, or mistake"; and Shelley himself says, "the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own."

Shelley was always searching for love; and, although he knew well, through his study of Plato, the difference between earthly and spiritual love, that the one is but the lowest step on the ladder which leads to the other, yet in actual practice he confounded the two. He knew that he did so; and only a month before his death, he summed up in a sentence the tragedy of his life. He writes to Mr Gisborne about the Epipsychidion, saying that he cannot look at it now, for—

"the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno," and continues, "If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."

No poet has a more distinct philosophy of life than Browning. Indeed he has as much a right to a place among the philosophers, as Plato has to one among the poets. Browning is a seer, and pre-eminently a mystic; and it is especially interesting as in the case of Plato and St Paul, to encounter this latter quality as a dominating characteristic of the mind of so keen and logical a dialectician. We see at once that the main position of Browning's belief is identical with what we have found to be the characteristic of mysticism—unity under diversity at the centre of all existence. The same essence, the one life, expresses itself through every diversity of form.

He dwells on this again and again:—

God is seen
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.

And through all these forms there is growth upwards. Indeed, it is only upon this supposition that the poet can account for

many a thrill
Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers
Called Nature: animate, inanimate
In parts or in the whole, there's something there
Man-like that somehow meets the man in me.

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

The poet sees that in each higher stage we benefit by the garnered experience of the past; and so man grows and expands and becomes capable of feeling for and with everything that lives. At the same time the higher is not degraded by having worked in and through the lower, for he distinguishes between the continuous persistent life, and the temporary coverings it makes use of on its upward way;

From first to last of lodging, I was I,
And not at all the place that harboured me.

Humanity then, in Browning's view, is not a collection of individuals, separate and often antagonistic, but one whole.

When I say "you" 'tis the common soul,
The collective I mean: the race of Man
That receives life in parts to live in a whole
And grow here according to God's clear plan.

Old Pictures in Florence.

This sense of unity is shown in many ways: for instance, in Browning's protest against the one-sidedness of nineteenth-century scientific thought, the sharp distinction or gulf set up between science and religion. This sharp cleavage, to the mystic, is impossible. He knows, however irreconcilable the two may appear, that they are but different aspects of the same thing. This is one of the ways in which Browning anticipates the most advanced thought of the present day.

In Paracelsus he emphasises the fact that the exertion of power in the intelligence, or the acquisition of knowledge, is useless without the inspiration of love, just as love is waste without power. Paracelsus sums up the matter when he says to Aprile—

I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge....
We must never part ...
Till thou the lover, know; and I, the knower,
Love—until both are saved.

Arising logically out of this belief in unity, there follows, as with all mystics, the belief in the potential divinity of man, which permeates all Browning's thought, and is continually insisted on in such poems as Rabbi ben Ezra, A Death in the Desert, and The Ring and the Book. He takes for granted the fundamental position of the mystic, that the object of life is to know God; and according to the poet, in knowing love we learn to know God. Hence it follows that love is the meaning of life, and that he who finds it not

loses what he lived for
And eternally must lose it.

Christina.

For life with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear ...
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love.

A Death in the Desert.

This is Browning's central teaching, the key-note of his work and philosophy. The importance of love in life is to Browning supreme, because he holds it to be the meeting-point between God and man. Love is the sublimest conception possible to man; and a life inspired by it is the highest conceivable form of goodness.

In this exaltation of love, as in several other points, Browning much resembles the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. To compare the two writers in detail would be an interesting task; it is only possible here to suggest points of resemblance. The following passage from Eckhart suggests several directions in which Browning's thought is peculiarly mystical:—

Intelligence is the youngest faculty in man.... The soul in itself is a simple work; what God works in the simple light of the soul is more beautiful and more delightful than all the other works which He works in all creatures. But foolish people take evil for good and good for evil. But to him who rightly understands, the one work which God works in the soul is better and nobler and higher than all the world. Through that light comes grace. Grace never comes in the intelligence or in the will. If it could come in the intelligence or in the will, the intelligence and the will would have to transcend themselves. On this a master says: There is something secret about it; and thereby he means the spark of the soul, which alone can apprehend God. The true union between God and the soul takes place in the little spark, which is called the spirit of the soul.^[9]

The essential unity of God and man is expressed more than once by Browning in Eckhart's image: as when he speaks of God as Him

Who never is dishonoured in the spark
He gave us from his fire of fires.

He is at one with Eckhart, and with all mystics, in his appeal from the intellect to that which is beyond intellect; in his assertion of the supremacy of feeling, intuition, over knowledge. Browning never wearies of dwelling on the relativity of physical knowledge, and its inadequacy to satisfy man. This is perhaps best brought out in one of the last things he wrote, the "Reverie" in Asolando; but it is dwelt on in nearly all his later and more reflective poems. His maxim was—

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust
As wholly love allied to ignorance!
There lies thy truth and safety. ...
Consider well!
Were knowledge all thy faculty, then God
Must be ignored: love gains him by first leap.

A Pillar at Sebzevar.

Another point of resemblance with Eckhart is suggested by his words: "That foolish people take evil for good, and good for evil." Browning's theory of evil is part of the working-out of his principle of what may be called the coincidence of extreme opposites. This is, of course, part of his main belief in unity, but it is an interesting development of it. This theory is marked all through his writings; and, although philosophers have dealt with it, he is perhaps the one poet who faces the problem, and expresses himself on the point with entire conviction. His view is that good and evil are purely relative terms (see The Bean-stripe), and that one cannot exist without the other. It is evil which alone makes possible some of the divinest qualities in man—compassion, pity, forgiveness patience. We have seen that Shelley shares this view, "for none knew good from evil"; and Blake expresses himself very strongly about it, and complains that Plato "knew nothing but the virtues and vices, the good and evil.... There is nothing in all that.... Everything is good in God's eyes." Mysticism is always a reconcilement of opposites; and this, as we have seen in connection with science and religion, knowledge and love, is a dominant note of Browning's philosophy. He brings it out most startlingly perhaps in The Statue and the Bust, where he shows that in his very capacity for vice, a man proves his capacity for virtue, and that a failure of energy in the one implies a corresponding failure of energy in the other.

At the same time, clear knowledge that evil is illusion would defeat its own end and paralyse all moral effort, for evil only exists for the development of good in us.

Type needs antitype:
As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good
Needs evil: how were pity understood
Unless by pain?

This is one reason why Browning never shrank from the evil in the world, why indeed he expended so much of his mind and art on the analysis and dissection of every kind of evil, laying bare for us the working of the mind of the criminal, the hypocrite, the weakling, and the cynic; because he held that—

Only by looking low, ere looking high
Comes penetration of the mystery.

There are other ways in which Browning's thought is especially mystical, as, for instance, his belief in pre-existence, and his theory of knowledge, for he, like Plato, believes in the light within the soul, and holds that—

To know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.

Paracelsus, Act I.

But the one thought which is ever constant with him, and is peculiarly helpful to the practical man, is his recognition of the value of limitation in all our energies, and the stress he lays on the fact that only by virtue of this limitation can we grow. We should be paralysed else. It is Goethe's doctrine of Entbehrung, and it is vividly portrayed in the epistle of Karshish. Paracelsus learns it, and makes it clear to Festus at the end.

The natural result of Browning's theory of evil, and his sense of the value of limitation, is that he should welcome for man the experience of doubt, difficulty, temptation, pain; and this we find is the case.

Life is probation and the earth no goal
But starting point of man...
To try man's foot, if it will creep or climb
'Mid obstacles in seeming, points that prove
Advantage for who vaults from low to high
And makes the stumbling-block a stepping-stone.

The Ring and the Book: The Pope, 1436-7, 410-13.

It is this trust in unending progress, based on the consciousness of present failure, which is peculiarly inspiriting in Browning's thought, and it is essentially mystical. Instead of shrinking from pain, the mystic prays for it, for, properly met, it means growth.

Was the trial sore?
Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestaled in triumph?

The Ring and the Book: The Pope, 1182-02.

Rossetti's mysticism is perhaps a more salient feature in his art than is the case with Browning, and the lines of it, and its place in his work, have been well described by Mr Theodore Watts-Dutton.^[10] We can only here indicate wherein it lies, and how it differs from and falls short of the mysticism of Shelley and Browning. Rossetti, unlike Browning, is not the least metaphysical; he is not devoured by philosophical curiosity; he has no desire to solve the riddle of the universe. All his life he was dominated and fascinated by beauty, one form of which in especial so appealed to him as at times almost to overpower him—the beauty of the face of woman.^[11] But this beauty is not an end in itself; it is not the desire of possession that so stirs him, but rather an absolute thirst for the knowledge of the mystery which he feels is hiding beneath and beyond it. Here lies his mysticism. It is this haunting passion which is the greatest thing in Rossetti, which inspires all that is best in him as artist, the belief that beauty is but the expression or symbol of something far greater and higher, and that it has kinship with immortal things. For beauty, which, as Plato has told us, is of all the divine ideas at once most manifest and most lovable to man, is for Rossetti the actual and visible symbol of love, which is at once the mystery and solution of the secret of life.^[12] Rossetti's mystical passion is perhaps most perfectly expressed in his little early prose romance, Hand and Soul. It is purer and more austere than much of his poetry, and breathes an amazing force of spiritual vision. One wonders, after reading it, that the writer himself did not attain to a loftier and more spiritual development of life and art; and one cannot help feeling the reason was that he did not sufficiently heed the warning of Plotinus, not to let ourselves become entangled in sensuous beauty, which will engulf us as in a swamp.

Coventry Patmore was so entirely a mystic that it seems to be the first and the last and the only thing to say about him. His central conviction is the unity of all things, and hence their mutual interpretation and symbolic force. There is only one kind of knowledge which counts with him, and that is direct apprehension or perception, the knowledge a man has of Love, by being in love, not by reading about its symptoms. The "touch" of God is not a figure of speech.

"Touch," says Aquinas, "applies to spiritual things as well as to material things.... The fulness of intelligence is the obliteration of intelligence. God is then our honey, and we, as St Augustine says, are His; and who wants to understand honey or requires the rationale of a kiss?" (Rod, Root, and Flower, xx.)

Once given the essential idea, to be grasped by the intuitive faculty alone, the world is full of analogies, of natural revelations which help to support and illustrate great truths. Patmore was, however, caught and enthralled by one aspect of unity, by one great analogy, almost to the exclusion of all others. This is that in human love, but above all in wedded love, we have a symbol (that is an expression of a similar force in different material) of the love between God and the soul. What Patmore meant was that in the relationship and attitude of wedded lovers we hold the key to the mystery at the heart of life, and that we have in it a "real apprehension" (which is quite different from real comprehension^[13]) of the relationship and attitude of humanity to God. His first wife's love revealed to him this, which is the basic fact of all his thought and work.

The relationship of the soul to Christ as His betrothed wife is the key to the feeling with which prayer and love and honour should be offered to Him ... She showed me what that relationship involves of heavenly submission and spotless passionate loyalty.^[14]

He believed that sex is a relationship at the base of all things natural and divine;

Nature, with endless being rife,
Parts each thing into "him" and "her"
And, in the arithmetic of life,
The smallest unit is a pair.^[15]

This division into two and reconciliation into one, this clash of forces resulting in life, is, as Patmore points out in words curiously reminiscent of those of Boehme, at the root of all existence. All real apprehension of God, he says, is dependent upon the realisation of his triple Personality in one Being.

Nature goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity in animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and material atom owing its being to the synthesis or "embrace" of the two opposed forces of expansion and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a single entity but in virtue of its being thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and in humanity and natural life this takes the form of sex, the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten sex spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of sex, but its fulfilment and power, as the electric fire is the fulfilment and power of positive and negative in their "embrace."

The essay from which this passage is taken, The Bow set in the Cloud, together with The Precursor, give in full detail an exposition of this belief of Patmore's, which was for him "the burning heart of the Universe."

Female and male God made the man;
His image is the whole, not half;
And in our love we dimly scan
The love which is between Himself.^[16]

God he conceived of as the great masculine positive force, the soul as the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the "mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source of all life and joy.

This profound and very difficult theme is treated by Patmore in a manner at once austere and passionate in the exquisite little preludes to the Angel in the House, and more especially in the odes, which stand alone in nineteenth-century poetry for poignancy of feeling and depth of spiritual passion. They are the highest expression of "erotic mysticism"^[17] in English; a marvellous combination of flaming ardour and sensuousness of description with purity and austerity of tone. This latter effect is gained largely by the bare and irregular metre, which has a curiously compelling beauty of rhythm and dignity of cadence.

The book into which Patmore put the fullness of his convictions, the Sponsa Dei, which he burnt because he feared it revealed too much to a world not ready for it, was says Mr Gosse, who had read it in manuscript, "a transcendental treatise on Divine desire seen through the veil of human desire." We can guess fairly accurately its tenor and spirit if we read the prose essay Dieu et ma Dame and the wonderful ode Sponsa Dei, which, happily, the poet did not destroy.

It may be noted that the other human affections and relationships also have for Patmore a deep symbolic value, and two of his finest odes are written, the one in symbolism of mother love, the other in that of father and son.^[18]

We learn by human love, so be points out, to realise the possibility of contact between the finite and Infinite, for divinity can only be revealed by voluntarily submitting to limitations. It is "the mystic craving of the great to become the love-captive of the small, while the small has a corresponding thirst for the enthralment of the great."^[19]

And this process of intercourse between God and man is symbolised in the Incarnation, which is not a single event in time, but the culmination of an eternal process. It is the central fact of a man's experience, "for it is going on perceptibly in himself"; and in like manner "the Trinity becomes the only and self-evident explanation of mysteries which are daily wrought in his own complex nature."^[20] In this way is it that to Patmore religion is not a question of blameless life or the holding of certain beliefs, but it is "an experimental science" to be lived and to be felt, and the clues to the experiments are to be found in natural human processes and experiences interpreted in the light of the great dogmas of the Christian faith.

For Keats, the avenue to truth and reality took the form of Beauty. The idea, underlying most deeply and consistently the whole of his poetry, is that of the unity of life; and closely allied with this is the belief in progress, through ever-changing, ever-ascending stages. Sleep and Poetry, Endymion, and Hyperion represent very well three stages in the poet's thought and art. In Sleep and Poetry Keats depicts the growth even in an individual life, and describes the three stages of thought, or attitudes towards life, through which the poet must pass. They are not quite parallel to the three stages of the mystical ladder marked out by Wordsworth in the main body of his poetry, because they do not go quite so far, but they are almost exactly analogous to the three stages of mind he describes in Tintern Abbey. The first is mere animal pleasure and delight in living—

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy without grief or care
Hiding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows simple unreflective enjoyment of Nature. The next stage is sympathy with human life, with human grief and joy, which brings a sense of the mystery of the world, a longing to pierce it and arrive at its meaning, symbolised in the figure of the charioteer.

Towards the end of Keats's life this feeling was growing stronger; and it is much dwelt upon in the Revision of Hyperion. There he plainly states that the merely artistic life, the life of the dreamer, is selfish; and that the only way to gain real insight is through contact and sympathy with human suffering and sorrow; and in the lost Woodhouse transcript of the Revision, rediscovered in 1904, there are some lines in which this point is still further emphasised. The full realisation of this third stage was not granted to Keats during his short life; he had but gleams of it. The only passage where he describes the ecstasy of vision is in Endymion (bk. i., 1. 774 ff.), and this resembles in essentials all the other reports of this experience given by mystics. When the mind is ready, anything may lead us to it—music, imagination, love, friendship.

Feel we these things?—that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's.

Keats felt this passage was inspired, and in a letter to Taylor in January 1818 he says, "When I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth."

In Endymion, the underlying idea is the unity of the various elements of the individual soul; the love of woman is shown to be the same as the love of beauty; and that in its turn is identical with the love of the principle of beauty in all things. Keats was always very sensitive to the mysterious effects of moonlight, and so for him the moon became a symbol for the great abstract principle of beauty, which, during the whole of his poetic life, he worshipped intellectually and spiritually. "The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness," he writes to his brother George; and the last two well-known lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn fairly sum up his philosophy—

Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

So that the moon represents to Keats the eternal idea, the one essence in all. This is how he writes of it, in what is an entirely mystical passage in Endymion—

... As I grew in years, still didst thou blend
With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen;
Thou wast the mountain-top, the sage's pen,
The poet's harp, the voice of friends, the sun;
Thou wast the river, thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion's blast, thou wast my steed,
My goblet full of wine, my topmost deed:
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

In his fragment of Hyperion, Keats shadows forth the unity of all existence, and gives magnificent utterance to the belief that change is not decay, but the law of growth and progress. Oceanus, in his speech to the overthrown Titans, sums up the whole meaning as far as it has gone, in verse which is unsurpassed in English—

We fall by course of Nature's law, not force
Of thunder, or of Jove ...
... on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass

In glory that old Darkness ...
... for 'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.

This is true mysticism, the mysticism Keats shares with Burke and Carlyle, the passionate belief in continuity of essence through ever-changing forms.

Chapter III

Nature Mystics

Vaughan and Wordsworth stand pre-eminent among our English poets in being almost exclusively occupied with one theme, the mystical interpretation of nature. Both poets are of a meditative, brooding cast of mind; but whereas Wordsworth arrives at his philosophy entirely through personal experience and sensation, Vaughan is more of a mystical philosopher, deeply read in Plato and the mediæval alchemists. The constant comparison of natural with spiritual processes is, on the whole, the most marked feature of Vaughan's poetry. If man will but attend, he seems to say to us, everything will discourse to him of the spirit. He broods on the silk-worm's change into the butterfly (Resurrection and Immortality); he ponders over the mystery of the continuity of life as seen in the plant, dying down and entirely disappearing in winter, and shooting up anew in the spring (The Hidden Flower); or, while wandering by his beloved river Usk, he meditates near the deep pool of a waterfall on its mystical significance as it seems to linger beneath the banks and then to shoot onward in swifter course, and he sees in it an image of life beyond the grave. The seed growing secretly in the earth suggests to him the growth of the soul in the darkness of physical matter; and in Affliction he points out that all nature is governed by a law of periodicity and contrast, night and day, sunshine and shower; and as the beauty of colour can only exist by contrast, so are pain, sickness, and trouble needful for the development of man. These poems are sufficient to illustrate the temper of Vaughan's mind, his keen, reverent observation of nature in all her moods, and his intense interest in the minutest happenings, because they are all manifestations of the one mighty law.

Vaughan appears to have had a more definite belief in pre-existence than Wordsworth, for he refers to it more than once; and The Retreate, which is probably the best known of all his poems and must have furnished some suggestion for the Immortality Ode, is based upon it. Vaughan has occasionally an almost perfect felicity of mystical expression, a power he shares with Donne, Keats, Rossetti, and Wordsworth. His ideas then produce their effect through the medium of art, directly on the feelings. The poem called Quickness is perhaps the best example of this peculiar quality, which cannot be analysed but must simply be felt; or The World, with its magnificent symbol in the opening lines:—

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow mov'd.^[21]

Mysticism is the most salient feature of Wordsworth's poetry, for he was one who saw, whose inward eye was focussed to visions scarce dreamt of by men. It is because of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of his vision that he is a difficult poet to understand, and the key to the understanding of him is a mystic one. People talk of the difficulty of Browning, but he is easy reading compared with a great deal of Wordsworth. It is just the apparent simplicity of Wordsworth's thought which is so misleading. A statement about him of the following kind would be fairly generally accepted as the truth. Wordsworth was a simple-minded poet with a passion for nature, he found great joy and consolation in the contemplation of the beauty of hills and dales and clouds and flowers, and urged others to find this too; he lived, and recommended others to live a quiet retired unexciting kind of life, and he preached a doctrine of simplicity and austerity. Now, except that Wordsworth had a passion for Nature, there is not a single true statement here. Wordsworth was not only a poet, he was also a seer, a mystic and a practical psychologist with an amazingly subtle mind, and an unusual capacity for feeling; he lived a life of excitement and passion, and he preached a doctrine of magnificence and glory. It was not the beauty of Nature which brought him joy and peace, but the life in Nature. He himself had caught a vision of that life, he knew it and felt it, and it transformed the whole of existence for him. He believed that every man could attain this vision which he so fully possessed, and his whole life's work took the form of a minute and careful analysis of the processes of feeling in his own nature, which he left as a guide for those who would tread the same path. It would be correct to say that the whole of his poetry is a series of notes and investigations devoted to the practical and detailed explanation of how he considered this state of vision might be reached. He disdained no experience—however trivial, apparently—the working of the mind of a peasant child or an idiot boy, the effect produced on his own emotions by a flower, a glowworm, a bird's note, a girl's song; he passed by nothing which might help to throw light on this problem. The experience which Wordsworth was so anxious others should share was the following. He found that when his mind was freed from pre-occupation with disturbing objects, petty cares, "little enmities and low desires," that he could then reach a condition of equilibrium, which he describes as a "wise passiveness," or a "happy stillness of the mind." He believed this condition could be deliberately induced by a kind of relaxation of the will, and by a stilling of the busy intellect and striving desires. It is a purifying process, an emptying out of all that is worrying, self-assertive, and self-seeking. If we can habitually train ourselves and attune our minds to this condition, we may at any moment come across something which will arouse our emotions, and it is then, when our emotions—thus purified—are excited to the point of passion, that our vision becomes sufficiently clear to enable us to gain actual experience of the "central peace subsisting for ever at the heart of endless agitation." Once seen, this vision changes for us the whole of life; it reveals unity in what to our every-day sight appears to be diversity, harmony where ordinarily we hear but discord, and joy, overmastering joy, instead of sorrow.

It is a kind of illumination, whereby in a lightning flash we see that the world is quite different from what it ordinarily appears to be, and when it is over—for the experience is but momentary—it is impossible to describe the vision in precise terms, but the effect of it is such as to inspire and guide the whole subsequent life of the seer. Wordsworth several times depicts this "bliss ineffable" when "all his thought were steeped in feeling." The well-known passage in Tintern Abbey already quoted (p. 7) is one of the finest analysis of it left us by any of the seers, and it closely resembles the accounts given by Plotinus and Boehme of similar experiences.

To Wordsworth this vision came through Nature, and for this reason. He believed that all we see round us is alive, beating with the same life which pulsates in us. It is, he says,—

my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

and that if we will but listen and look, we will hear and see and feel this central life. This is the pith of the message we find repeated again and again in various forms throughout Wordsworth's poetry, and perhaps best summed up at the end of the fourth book of the Excursion, a book which should be closely studied by any one who would explore the secret of the poet's outlook upon life. He tells us in the Prelude (Book iii.) that even in boyhood it was by this feeling he "mounted to community with highest truth"—

To every natural form, rock, fruits, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

Wordsworth, in short, was haunted by the belief that the secret of the universe is written clearly all round us, could we but train and purify our mind and emotions so as to behold it. He believed that we are in something the same attitude towards Nature as an illiterate untrained person might be in the presence of a book containing the philosophy of Hegel. To the educated trained thinker, who by long and arduous discipline has developed his mental powers, that book contains the revelation of the thought of a great mind; whereas to the uneducated person it is merely a bundle of paper with words printed on it. He can handle it, touch it, see it, he can read the words, he can even understand many of them separately, but the essence of the book and its meaning remains closed to him until he can effect some alteration in himself which will enable him to understand it.

Wordsworth's claim is that he had discovered by his own experience a way to effect the necessary alteration in ourselves which will enable us to catch glimpses of the truths expressing themselves all round us. It is a great claim, but he would seem to have justified it.

It is interesting that the steps in the ladder of perfection, as described by Wordsworth, are precisely analogous to the threefold path or "way" of the religious and philosophic mystic, an ethical system or rule of life, of which, very probably, Wordsworth had never heard.

The mystic vision was not attained by him, any more than by others, without deliberate renunciation. He lays great stress upon this; and yet it is a point in his teaching sometimes overlooked. He insists repeatedly upon the fact that before any one can taste of these joys of the spirit, he must be purified, disciplined, self-controlled. He leaves us a full account of his purgative stage. Although he started life with a naturally pure and austere temperament, yet he had deliberately to crush out certain strong passions to which he was liable, as well as all personal ambition, all love of power, all desire for fame or money; and to confine himself to the contemplation of such objects as—

excite
No morbid passions, no disquietude,
No vengeance and no hatred.

In the Recluse he records how he deliberately fought, and bent to other uses, a certain wild passionate delight he felt in danger, a struggle or victory over a foe, in short, some of the primitive instincts of a strong, healthy animal, feelings which few would regard as reprehensible. These natural instincts, this force and energy, good in themselves, Wordsworth did not crush, but deliberately turned into a higher channel.

At the end of the Prelude he makes his confession of the sins he did not commit.

Never did I, in quest of right and wrong,
Tamper with conscience from a private aim;
Nor was in any public hope the dupe
Of selfish passions; nor did ever yield
Wilfully to mean cares or low pursuits.

Such a confession, or rather boast, in the mouth of almost any other man would sound hypocritical or self-complacent; but with Wordsworth, we feel it is the bare truth told us for our help and guidance, as being the necessary and preliminary step. It is a high standard which is held up before us, even in this first stage, for it includes, not merely the avoidance of all obvious sins against man and society, but a tuning-up, a transmuting of the whole nature to high and noble endeavour. Wordsworth found his reward, in a settled state of calm serenity, "consummate happiness," "wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative," and, as he tells us in the fourth book of the Prelude, on one evening during that summer vacation,

Gently did my soul
Put off her veil, and, self-transmuted, stood
Naked, as in the presence of her God.

When the mind and soul have been prepared, the next step is concentration, aspiration. Then it is borne in upon the poet that in the infinite and in the eternal alone can we find rest, can we find ourselves; and towards this infinitude we must strive with unflagging ardour;

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there.

Prelude, Book vi. 604.

The result of this aspiration towards the infinite is a quickening of consciousness, upon which follows the attainment of the third or unitive stage, the moment when man can "breathe in worlds to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil," and perceive "the forms whose kingdom is where time and place are not." Such minds—

need not extraordinary calls
To rouse them; in a world of life they live,
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
... the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs—the consciousness
Of Whom they are.

Prelude, Book xiv. 105, 113,

Wordsworth possessed in a peculiar degree a mystic sense of infinity, of the boundless, of the opening-out of the world of our normal finite experience into the transcendental; and he had a rare power of putting this into words. It was a feeling which, as he tells us in the Prelude (Book xiii.), he had from earliest childhood, when the disappearing line of the public highway—

Was like an invitation into space
Boundless, or guide into eternity,

a feeling which, applied to man, gives that inspiriting certitude of boundless growth, when the soul has—

... an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire.

It is at this point, and on this subject, that Wordsworth's poetical and ethical imagination are most nearly fused. This fusion is far from constant with him; and the result is that there are tracts of his writings where the sentiments are excellent, the philosophy illuminating, but the poetry is not great: it does not awaken the "transcendental feeling."^[22] The moments when this condition is most fully attained by Wordsworth occur when, by sheer force of poetic imagination combined with spiritual insight, in some mysterious and indescribable way, he flashes upon us a sensation of boundless infinity. Herein consists the peculiar magic of such a poem as Stepping Westward; and there is a touch of the same feeling in the Solitary Reaper.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on other mystical elements in Wordsworth, such as his belief in the one law governing all things, "from creeping plant to sovereign man," and the hint of belief in pre-existence in the Ode on Immortality. His attitude towards life as a whole is to be found in a few lines in the "after-thought" to the Duddon sonnets.

The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish:—be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.

Richard Jefferies is closely akin to Wordsworth in his overpowering consciousness of the life in nature. This consciousness is the strongest force in him, so that at times he is almost submerged by it, and he loses the sense of outward things. In this condition of trance the sense of time vanishes, there is, he asserts, no such thing, no past or future, only now, which is eternity. In The Story of my Heart, a rhapsody of mystic experience and aspiration he describes in detail several such moments of exaltation or trance. He seems to be peculiarly sensitive to sunshine. As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal essence in all things, so to Jefferies the sun seems to be the physical expression or symbol of the central Force of the world, and it is through gazing on sunlight that he most often enters into the trance state.

Standing, one summer's morning, in a recess on London Bridge, he looks out on the sunshine "burning on steadfast," "lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my finger-nail."

"I was intensely conscious of it," he writes, "I felt it; I felt the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into the depths of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the sky, the limitless space, I felt too in the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among the immortal, and the greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment."^[23]

When he reaches this state, outer things drop away,^[24] and he seems to become lost, and absorbed into the being of the universe. He partakes, momentarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through nature. The least blade of grass, he says, or the greatest oak, "seemed like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me. Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe filled me."^[25]

This great central Life Force, which Jefferies, like Wordsworth, seemed at moments to touch, he, in marked contrast to other mystics, refuses to call God. For, he says, what we understand by deity is the purest form of mind, and he sees no mind in nature. It is a force without a mind, "more subtle than electricity, but absolutely devoid of consciousness and with no more feeling than the force which lifts the tides."^[26] Yet this cannot content him, for later he declares there must be an existence higher than deity, towards which he aspires and presses with the whole force of his being. "Give me," he cries, "to live the deepest soul-life now and always with this 'Highest Soul.'"^[27]

This thrilling consciousness of spiritual life felt through nature, coupled with passionate aspiration to be absorbed in that larger life, are the two main features of the mysticism of Richard Jefferies.

His books, and especially The Story of my Heart, contain, together with the most exquisite nature description, a rich and vivid record of sensation, feeling, and aspiration. But it is a feeling which, though vivifying, can only be expressed in general terms, and it carries with it no vision and no philosophy. It is almost entirely emotional, and it is as an emotional record that it is of value, for Jefferies' intellectual reflections are, for the most part, curiously contradictory and unconvincing.

The certainty and rapture of this experience of spiritual emotion is all the more amazing when we remember that the record of it was written in agony, when he was wrecked with mortal illness and his nerves were shattered with pain. For with him, as later with Francis Thompson, physical pain and material trouble seemed to serve only to direct him towards and to enhance the glory of the spiritual vision.

Chapter IV

Philosophical Mystics

The mystical sense may be called philosophical in all those writers who present their convictions in a philosophic form calculated to appeal to the intellect as well as to the emotions. These writers, as a rule, though not always, are themselves markedly intellectual, and their primary concern therefore is with truth or wisdom. Thus Donne, William Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are all predominantly intellectual, while Traherne, Emily Brontë, and Tennyson clothe their thoughts to some extent in the language of philosophy.

The dominating characteristic of Donne is intellectuality; and this may partly account for the lack in him of some essentialty mystical qualities, more especially reverence, and that ascension of thought so characteristic of Plato and Browning. These shortcomings are very well illustrated in that extraordinary poem, The, Progress of the Soul. The idea is a mystical one, derived from Pythagorean philosophy, and has great possibilities, which Donne entirely fails to utilise; for, instead of following the soul upwards on its way, he depicts it as merely jumping about from body to body, and we are conscious of an entire lack of any lift or grandeur of thought. This poem helps us to understand how it was that Donne, though so richly endowed with intellectual gifts, yet failed to reach the highest rank as a poet. He was brilliant in particulars, but lacked the epic qualities of breadth, unity, and proportion, characteristics destined to be the distinctive marks of the school of which he is looked upon as the founder.

Apart from this somewhat important defect, Donne's attitude of mind is essentially mystical. This is especially marked in his feeling about the body and natural law, in his treatment of love, and in his conception of woman. The mystic's postulate—if we could know ourselves, we should know all—is often on Donne's lips, as for instance in that curious poem written in memory of Elizabeth Drury, on the second anniversary of her death. It is perhaps best expressed in the following verse:

But we know our selves least; Mere outward shews
Our mindes so store,
That our soules, no more than our eyes disclose
But forme and colour. Onely he who knowes
Himselfe, knowes more.

Ode: Of our Sense of Sinne.

One of the marked characteristics of Donne's poetry is his continual comparison of mental and spiritual with, physical processes. This sense of analogy prevailing throughout nature is with him very strong. The mystery of continual flux and change particularly attracts him, as it did the Buddhists^[28] and the early Greek thinkers, and Nettleship's remarks about the nature of bread and unselfishness are akin to the following comparison:—

Dost thou love
Beauty? (And beauty worthy'st is to move)
Poor cousened consener, that she, and that thou,
Which did begin to love, are neither now;
Next day repaires (but ill) last dayes decay.
Nor are, (although the river keepe the name)
Yesterdaies waters, and to-daies the same.

Of the Progresse of the Soule. The second Anniversarie, 389-96.

Donne believes firmly in man's potential greatness, and the power within his own soul:

Seeke wee then our selves in our selves; for as
Men force the Sunne with much more force to passe.
By gathering his beames with a chrystall glasse;

So wee, If wee into our selves will turne,
Blowing our sparkes of virtue, may out-burne
The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourne.

Letter to Mr Roland Woodward.

And although, in the Progress of the Soul, he failed to give expression to it, yet his belief in progress is unquenchable. He fully shares the mystic's view that "man, to get towards Him that's Infinite, must first be great" (Letter to the Countess of Salisbury).

In his treatment of love, Donne's mystical attitude is most clearly seen. He holds the Platonic conception, that love concerns the soul only, and is independent of the body, or bodily presence; and he is the poet, who, at his best, expresses this idea in the most dignified and refined way. The reader feels not only that Donne believes it, but that he has in some measure experienced it; whereas with his imitators it degenerated into little more than a fashionable "conceit." The Undertaking expresses the discovery he has made of this higher and deeper kind of love; and in the Ecstasy he describes the union of the souls of two lovers in language which proves his familiarity with the description of ecstasy given by Plotinus (Enn. vi. 9, § 11). The great value of this spiritual love is that it is unaffected by time and space, a belief which is nowhere more exquisitely expressed than in the refrain of his little song, Soul's Joy.^[29]

O give no way to griefe,
But let beliefe
Of mutuall love,
This wonder to the vulgar prove
Our Bodyes, not wee move.

In one of his verse letters to the Countess of Huntingdon^[30] he explains how true love cannot be desire:

'Tis love, but with such fatall weaknesse made,
That it destroyes it selfe with its owne shade.

He goes still further in the poem entitled Negative Love, where he says that love is such a passion as can only be defined by negatives, for it is above apprehension, and his language here is closely akin to the description of the One or the Good given by Plotinus in the sixth Ennead.

Thomas Traherne is a mystical writer of singular charm and originality. The manuscripts of his poems and his prose Meditations, a kind of spiritual autobiography and notebook, were only discovered and printed quite recently, and they form a valuable addition to the mystical literature of the seventeenth century.

He has affinities with Vaughan, Herbert, and Sir Thomas Browne, with Blake and with Wordsworth. He is deeply sensitive to the beauty of the natural world, and he insists on the necessity for rejoicing in this beauty if we are really to live. By love alone is God to be approached and known, he says, but this love must not be finite. "He must be loved in all with an unlimited love, even in all His doings, in all His friends, in all His creatures." In a prose passage of sustained beauty Traherne thus describes the attitude towards earth which is needful before we can enter heaven.

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars:.... Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels;.... till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.... The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.... It is, the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven.^[31]

He is for ever reiterating, in company with all the mystics, that

'Tis not the object, but the light
That maketh Heaven: 'tis a purer sight.

He shares Wordsworth's rapture in the life of nature, and Browning's interest in his fellow-men; he has Shelley's belief in the inner meaning of love, and much of Keats's worship of beauty, and he expresses this in an original and lyrical prose of quite peculiar and haunting beauty. He has embodied his main ideas, with a good deal of repetition both in prose and verse, but it is invariably the prose version, probably written first, which is the most arresting and vigorous.

His Meditations well repay careful study; they are full of wisdom and of an imaginative philosophy, expressed in pithy and telling form, which continually reminds the reader of Blake's Proverbs of Hell.

To have no principles or to live beside them, is equally miserable.
Philosophers are not those that speak but do great things.
All men see the same objects, but do not equally understand them.
Souls to souls are like apples, one being rotten rots another.

This kind of saying abounds on every page. Some of his more sustained philosophic passages are also noteworthy; such, for instance, is his comparison of the powers of the soul to the rays of the sun, which carry light in them unexpressed until they meet an object (Meditations, second century, No. 78). But Traherne's most interesting contribution to the psychology of mysticism is his account of his childhood and the "vision splendid" that he brought with him. Even more to him than to Vaughan or Wordsworth,

The earth, and every common sight
... did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,

and his description of his feelings and spiritual insight are both astonishing and convincing. A number of his poems are devoted to this topic (The Salutation, Wonder, Eden, Innocence, The Rapture, The Approach, and others), but it is the prose account which must be given.

All appeared now, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.... The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first ... transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places.... The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven.^[32]

It is necessary to quote at some length, because it is the way in which Traherne expresses his experiences or reflections which is the moving and original thing about him. This last passage seems to anticipate something of the magic of Keats in the Ode to a Nightingale or the Grecian Urn, the sense of continuity, and of eternity expressed in time. Traherne's account of the gradual dimming of this early radiance, and his enforced change of values is equally unusual. Only with great difficulty did his elders persuade him "that the tinselled ware upon a hobby-horse was a fine thing" and that a purse of gold was of any value, but by degrees when he found that all men prized things he did not dream of, and never mentioned those he cared for, then his "thoughts were blotted out; and at last all the celestial great and stable treasures, to which I was born, as wholly forgotten, if as they had never been."

But he remembered enough of those early glories to realise that if he would regain happiness, he must "become, as it were, a little child again," get free of "the burden and cumber of devised wants," and recapture the value and the glory of the common things of life.

He was so resolutely bent on this that when he had left college and come into the country and was free, he lived upon £10 a year, fed on bread and water, and, like George Fox, wore a leather suit. Thus released from all worldly cares, he says, through God's blessing, "I live a free and kingly life as if the world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at this day."

In Emily Brontë we have an unusual type of mystic. Indeed she is one of the most strange and baffling figures in our literature. We know in truth very little about her, but that little is quite unlike what we know about any one else. It is now beginning to be realised that she was a greater and more original genius than her famous sister, and that strong as were Charlotte's passion and imagination, the passion and imagination of Emily were still stronger. She had, so far as we can tell, peculiarly little actual experience of life, her material interests were bounded by her family, the old servant Tabby, the dogs, and the moors. For the greater part of her thirty years of life she did the work of a servant in the little parsonage house on the edge of the graveyard. She can have read little of philosophy or metaphysics, and probably had never heard of the mystics; she was brought up in a narrow, crude, and harshly material creed; yet her own inner experience, her touch with the secret of life, enabled her to write the remarkable series of poems the peculiar and haunting quality of which has as yet scarcely been recognised. They are strong and free and certain, hampered by no dogma, weighted by no explanation, but containing—in the simplest language—the record of the experience and the vision of a soul. Emily Brontë lived remote, unapproachable, self-sufficing and entirely detached, yet consumed with a fierce, unquenchable love of life and of nature, of the life which withheld from her all the gifts most prized of men, love, friendship, experience, recognition, fame; and of the nature which she knew only on a circumscribed space of the wild Yorkshire moors.

In her poems her mysticism is seen principally in two ways: in her unerring apprehension of values, of the illusory quality of material things, even of the nature she so loved, together with the certain vision of the one Reality behind all forms. This, and her description of ecstasy, of the all-sufficing joy of the inner life of one who has tasted this experience, mark her out as being among those who have seen, and who know. In The Prisoner, the speaker, a woman, is "confined in triple walls," yet in spite of bolts and bars and dungeon gloom she holds within herself an inextinguishable joy and unmeasured freedom brought to her every night by a "messenger."

He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

---

But, first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.

Oh! dreadful is the check—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

This is the description—always unmistakable—of the supreme mystic experience, the joy of the outward flight, the pain of the return, and it could only have been written by one who in some measure had knowledge of it. This, together with the exquisite little poem The Visionary, which describes a similar experience, and The Philosopher, stand apart as expressions of spiritual vision, and are among the most perfect mystic poems in English.

Her realisation of the meaning of common things, her knowledge that they hold the secret of the universe, and her crystallisation of this in verse, place her with Blake and Wordsworth.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? More glory and more grief than I can tell: The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

And finally, the sense of continuous life—one central, all-sustaining Life—of the oneness of God and man, has never been more nobly expressed than in what is her best-known poem, the last lines she ever wrote:—

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!

---

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

Tennyson differs widely from the other poets whom we are considering in this connection. He was not born with the mystical temperament, but, on the contrary, he had a long and bitter struggle with his own doubts and questionings before he wrested from them peace. There is nothing of mystic calm or strength in the lines—

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.

He has no mystic rapture in Nature like Wordsworth,

I found Him not in world or sun
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye;

no mystic interpretation of life as had Browning, no yearning for union with the spirit of love and beauty as had Shelley. Tennyson's mysticism came, as it were, rather in spite of himself, and is based on one thing only—experience. He states his position quite clearly in In Memoriam, cxxiv. As is well known, he had from time to time a certain peculiar experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at intervals throughout his life of "ecstasy," and it was on this he based his deepest belief. He has left several prose accounts of this mental state, which often came to him through repeating his own name silently,

till all at once, as it wore, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life^[33]

It is a somewhat similar experience which is described in In Memoriam, xcv.

And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.

And again in the conclusion of the Holy Grail—

Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that strikes his forehead is not air
But vision—yea, his very hand and foot—
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a A vision, nor that One
Who rose again.

"These three lines," said Tennyson, speaking of the last three quoted, "are the (spiritually) central lines in the Idylls." They are also the central lines in his own philosophy, for it was the experience of this "vision" that inspired all his deepest convictions with regard to the unity of all things, the reality of the unseen, and the persistence of life.

The belief in the impotence of intellectual knowledge is very closely connected, it is indeed based, upon these "gleams" of ecstasy. The prologue to In Memoriam (written when the poem was completed) seems to sum up his faith after many years of struggle and doubt; but it is in the most philosophical as well as one of the latest, of his poems, The Ancient Sage, that we find this attitude most fully expressed. Tennyson wrote of it: "The whole poem is very personal. The passages about 'Faith' and 'the Passion of the Past' were more especially my own personal feelings." Through the mouth of the Sage, the poet declares in impassioned words the position of the mystic, and points out the impotence of sense-knowledge in dealing with that which is beyond either the senses or the reason:

For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm.

Tennyson, like Wordsworth, emphasises the truth that the only way in which man can gain real knowledge and hear the "Nameless" is by diving or sinking into the centre of his own being. There is a great deal of Eastern philosophy and mysticism in the Ancient Sage, as, for instance, the feeling of the unity of all existence to the point of merging the personality into the universal.

But that one ripple on the boundless deep
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself
For ever changing form, but evermore
One with the boundless motion of the deep.

We know that Tennyson had been studying the philosophy of Lâo-Tsze about this time; yet, though this is, as it were, grafted on to the poet's mind, still we may take it as being his genuine and deepest conviction. The nearest approach to a definite statement of it to be found in his poems is in the few stanzas called The Higher Pantheism, which he sent to be read at the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869.

Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet—
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

---

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not He?

In William Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle, we have a succession of great English prose-writers whose work and thought is permeated by a mystical philosophy. Of these four, Law is, during his later life, by far the most consistently and predominantly mystical.

As has been indicated, there were many strains of influence which in the seventeenth century tended to foster mystical thought in England. The group of Cambridge Platonists, to which Henry More belonged, gave new expression to the great Neo-platonic ideas, but in addition to this a strong vein of mysticism had been kept alive in Amsterdam, where the exiled Separatists had gone in 1593. They flourished there and waxed strong, and sent back to England during the next century a continual stream of opinion and literature. To this source can be traced the ideas which inspired alike the Quakers, the Seekers, the Behmenists, the Familists, and numberless other sects who all embodied a reaction against forms and ceremonies, which, in ceasing to be understood, had become lifeless. These sects were, up to a certain point, mystical in thought, for they all believed in the "inner light," in the immediate revelation of God within the soul as the all-important experience.

The persecutions of the Quakers under Charles II. tended to withdraw them from active philanthropy, and to throw them more in the direction of a personal and contemplative religion. It was then that the writings of Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon, and Fénelon became popular, and were much read among a certain section of thinkers, while the influence of the teachings of Jacob Boehme, whose works had been translated into English between the years 1644 and 1692, can be traced, in diverse ways. They impressed themselves on the thought of the founders of the Society of Friends, they produced a distinct "Behmenist" sect, and it would seem that the idea of the three laws of motion first reached Newton through his eager study of Boehme. But all this has nothing directly to do with literature, and would not concern us here were it not that in the eighteenth century William Law came into touch with many of these mystical thinkers, and that he has embodied in some of the finest prose in our language a portion of the "inspired cobbler's" vision of the universe.

Law's character is one of considerable interest. Typically English, and in intellect typically of the eighteenth century, logical, sane, practical, he is not, at first sight, the man one would expect to find in sympathy with the mystics. Sincerity is the keynote of his whole nature, sincerity of thought, of belief, of speech, and of life. Sincerity implies courage, and Law was a brave man, never shirking the logical outcome of his convictions, from the day when he ruined his prospects at Cambridge, to the later years when he suffered his really considerable reputation to be eclipsed by his espousal of an uncomprehended and unpopular mysticism. He had a keen rather than a profound intellect, and his thought is lightened by brilliant flashes of wit or of grim satire. We can tell, however, from his letters and his later writings, that underneath a severe and slightly stiff exterior, were hidden emotion, enthusiasm, and great tenderness of feeling.

By middle life Law was well known as a most able and brilliant writer on most of the burning theological questions of the day, as well as the author of one of the best loved and most widely read practical and ethical treatises in the language, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. These earlier writings are by far the best known of his works, and it is with the Serious Call that his name will always be associated.

Until middle age he showed no marked mystical tendency, although we know that from the time he was an undergraduate he was a "diligent reader" of mystical books, and that he had studied, among others, Dionysius the Areopagite, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Suso, and the seventeenth century Quietists, Fénelon, Madame Guyon, and Antoinette Bourignon.

When, however, he was about forty-six (c. 1733), he came across the writings of the seer who set his whole nature aglow with spiritual fervour, so that when he first read his works they put him into "a perfect sweat." Jacob Boehme—or Behmen, as he has usually been called in England—(1575-1624), the illiterate and untrained peasant shoemaker of Görlitz, is one of the most amazing phenomena in the history of mysticism, a history which does not lack wonders. His work has so much influenced later mystical thought and philosophy that a little space must be devoted to him here. He lived outwardly the quiet, hard-working life of a simple German peasant, but inwardly—like his fellow-seer Blake—he lived in a glory of illumination, which by flashes revealed to him the mysteries and splendours he tries in broken and faltering words to record. He saw with the eye of his mind into the heart of things, and he wrote down as much of it as he could express.

The older mystics—eastern and western alike—had laid stress on unity as seen in the nature of God and all things. No one more fully believed in ultimate unity than did Boehme, but he lays peculiar stress on the duality, or more accurately, the trinity in unity; and the central point of his philosophy is the fundamental postulate that all manifestation necessitates opposition. He asserted the uniformity of law throughout all existence, physical and spiritual, and this law, which applies all through nature, divine and human alike, is that nothing can reveal itself without resistance, good can only be known through evil, and weakness through strength, just as light is only visible when reflected by a dark body.

Thus when God, the Triune Principle, or Will under three aspects, desires to become manifest, He divides the Will into two, the "yes" and the "no," and so founds an eternal contrast to Himself out of His own hidden Nature, in order to enter into struggle with it, and finally to discipline and assimilate it. The object of all manifested nature is the transforming of the will which says "No" into the will which says "Yes," and this is brought about by seven organising spirits or forms. The first three of these bring nature out of the dark element to the point where contact with the light is possible. Boe