Mysticism in English Literature

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ill 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

r 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 med

nity the o

ing of pure an

as it wa

h it, Time, in h

by the

st shadow

ind, 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 s

e 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 feeli

reason. He believed that all we see round us is alive, beati

that ev

e air it

hroughout 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

l form, rock, f

stones that cov

al life: I s

to some feeling

a quickening

respired with

ht 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

essary alteration in ourselves which will enable us to catch glimpses of the truths expres

re precisely analogous to the threefold path or "way" of the religious and philosophic myst

at 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,

ci

assions, no

nce and n

or victory over a foe, in short, some of the primitive instincts of a strong, healthy animal, feelings which few would regard as reprehensible

he makes his confession of

in quest of r

nscience from

any public

ssions; nor d

ean cares or

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 ende

did m

l, and, self-tr

the presenc

it is borne in upon the poet that in the infinite and in the eternal alone can we find res

our being's h

initude, an

, Book

attainment of the third or unitive stage, the moment when man can "breathe in worlds to which the heaven o

extraordi

in a world of

mpressions no

highes

know is theirs-

om th

Book xiv.

normal finite experience into the transcendental; and he had a rare power of putting this into words. It was a feeling which,

invitation

or guide in

ves that inspiriting certitude of b

obscu

e sublimit

faculties she

t, 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 sp

g all things, "from creeping plant to sovereign man," and the hint of belief in pre-existence in the Ode on Immortal

ns, the Functi

rave, the might

n our morn of

, must vanis

thing from our

ct, and serve

ward the sile

gh hope, and faith'

we are greate

ense 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 s

dge, he looks out on the sunshine "burning on steadfast,"

us 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 rea

tarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through nature. The least blade of grass, he says, or the greatest oak, "seemed like exterio

e 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 lat

coupled with passionate aspiration to be absorbed in that larger l

ation. 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 e

itten in agony, when he was wrecked with mortal illness and his nerves were shattered with pain. For with him, as later with Francis Th