le 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 th