nsations accompanying mystical initiation. _The Cloud of
Unknowing_ is an application in simple English of the Dionysian teaching
of concentration joined to the practice of contemplation taught by
Richard of St Victor, and it describes very clearly the preliminary
struggles and bewilderment of the soul. The _Epistle of Privy Counsel_
(still in MS.) is the most advanced in mystical teaching: the writer in
it tries to explain very intimately the nature of "onehede with God,"
and to give instruction in simple and yet deeply subtle terms as to the
means for attaining this.

There is a mystical strain in other writings of this time, the most
notable from the point of view of literature being in the
fourteenth-century alliterative poem of _Piers the Plowman_.[67] This is
mystical throughout in tone, more especially in the idea of the journey
of the soul in search of Truth, only to find, after many dangers and
disciplines and adventures, that--

If grace graunte the to go in this wise,
Thow shalt see in thi-selve Treuthe sitte in thine herte
In a cheyne of charyte as thow a childe were.[68]

Moreover, the vision of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, bears a definite
analogy to the three stages of the mystic's path, as will be seen if the
description of the qualities of these three are examined, as they are
given in B., Passus viii. 11. 78-102.

* * * * *

Crashaw, George Herbert, and Christopher Harvey all alike sound the
personal note in their religious poems. All three writers describe the
love of the soul for God in the terms of passionate human love: Crashaw
with an ardour which has never been surpassed, Herbert with a homely
intimacy quite peculiar to him, and Christopher Harvey with a point and
epigrammatic setting which serve only to enhance the deep feeling of
the thought.

In many a lyric of flaming passion Crashaw expresses his love-longing
for his God, and he describes in terms only matched by his spiritual
descendant, Francis Thompson, the desire of God to win the human soul.

Let not my Lord, the mighty lover
Of soules, disdain that I discover
The hidden art
Of his high stratagem to win your heart,
It was his heavnly art
Kindly to crosse you
In your mistaken love,
That, at the next remove
Thence he might tosse you
And strike your troubled heart
Home to himself.[69]

The main feature of Herbert's