never smelt one. In its highest consummation it is the supreme adventure
of the soul: to use the matchless words of Plotinus, it is "the flight
of the Alone to the Alone."

As distinguished, therefore, from the mystical thinker or philosopher,
the practical mystic has direct knowledge of a truth which for him is
absolute. He consequently has invariably acted upon this knowledge, as
inevitably as the blind man to whom sight had been granted would make
use of his eyes.

Among English writers and poets the only two who fulfil this strict
definition of a mystic are Wordsworth and Blake. But we are not here
concerned primarily with a study of those great souls who are mystics
in the full and supreme sense of the word. For an examination of their
lives and vision Evelyn Underhill's valuable book should be consulted.
Our object is to examine very briefly the chief English writers--men of
letters and poets--whose inmost principle is rooted in mysticism, 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