icism, or
whose work is on the whole so permeated by mystical thought that their
attitude of mind is not fully to be understood apart from it.

Naturally it is with the poets we find the most complete and continuous
expression of mystical thought and inspiration. Naturally, because it
has ever been the habit of the English race to clothe their profoundest
thought and their highest aspiration in poetic form. We do not possess a
Plato, a Kant, or a Descartes, but we have Shakespeare and Wordsworth
and Browning. And further, as the essence of mysticism is to believe
that everything we see and know is symbolic of something greater,
mysticism is on one side the poetry of life. For poetry, also, consists
in finding resemblances, and universalises the particulars with which it
deals. Hence the utterances of the poets on mystical philosophy are
peculiarly valuable. The philosopher approaches philosophy directly, the
poet obliquely; but the indirect teaching of a poet touches us more
profoundly than the direct lesson of a moral treatise, because the
latter appeals principally to our reason, whereas the poet touches our
"transcendental feeling."

So it is that mysticism underlies the thought of most of our great
poets, of nearly all our greatest poets, if we except Chaucer, Dryden,
Pope, and Byron. Shakespeare must be left on one side, first, because
the dramatic form does not lend itself to the expression of mystical
feeling, and secondly, because even in the poems there is little real
mysticism, though there is much of the fashionable Platonism.
Shakespeare is metaphysical rather than mystical, the difference being,
roughly, that the metaphysician seeks to know the beginnings or causes
of things, whereas the mystic feels he knows the end of things, that all
nature is leading up to union with the One.

We shall find that mystical thought, and the mystical attitude, are
curiously persistent in English literature, and that although it seems
out of keeping with our "John Bull" character, the English race has a
marked tendency towards mysticism. What we do find lacking in England is
the purely philosophical and speculative spirit of the detached and
unprejudiced seeker after truth. The English mind is anti-speculative;
it cares little for metaphysics; it prefers theology and a given
authority. English mystics have, as a rule, dealt little with the
theoretical side of mysticism, the aspect for instance with which
Plotinus largely