natural, of human love, of the human intellect, and of the natural
world. All those things which to the Eastern thinker are but an
obstruction and a veil, to the Western have become the very means of
spiritual ascent[5]. The ultimate goal of the Eastern mystic is summed
up in his assertion, "I am Brahman," whereas the Western mystic
believes that "he who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the mystical tradition was
carried on in France by St Bernard (1091-1153), the Abbot of Clairvaux,
and the Scotch or Irish Richard of the Abbey of St Victor at Paris, and
in Italy, among many others, by St Bonaventura (1221-1274), a close
student of Dionysius, and these three form the chief direct influences
on our earliest English mystics.

England shares to the full in the wave of mystical experience, thought,
and teaching which swept over Europe in the fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries, and at first the mystical literature of England, as
also of France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, is purely religious or
devotional in type, prose treatises for the most part containing
practical instruction for the inner life, written by hermits, priests,
and "anchoresses." In the fourteenth century we have a group of such
writers of great power and beauty, and in the work of Richard Rolle,
Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the author of the _Cloud of
Unknowing_, we have a body of writings dealing with the inner life, and
the steps of purification, contemplation, and ecstatic union which throb
with life and devotional fervour.

From the time of Julian of Norwich, who was still alive in 1413, we
find practically no literature of a mystical type until we come to
Spenser's _Hymns_ (1596), and these embody a Platonism reached largely