through the intellect, and not a mystic experience. It would seem at
first sight as if these hymns, or at any rate the two later ones in
honour of Heavenly Love and of Heavenly Beauty, should rank as some of
the finest mystical verse in English. Yet this is not the case. They are
saturated with the spirit of Plato, and they express in musical form the
lofty ideas of the _Symposium_ and the _Phædrus_: that beauty, more
nearly than any other earthly thing, resembles its heavenly prototype,
and that therefore the sight of it kindles love, which is the excitement
and rapture aroused in the soul by the remembrance of that divine beauty
which once it knew. And Spenser, following Plato, traces the stages of
ascent traversed by the lover of beauty, until he is caught up into
union with God Himself. Yet, notwithstanding their melody and their
Platonic doctrine, the note of the real mystic is wanting in the
_Hymns_, the note of him who writes of these things because he knows
them.

It would take some space to support this view in detail. Any one
desirous of testing it might read the account of transport of the soul
when rapt into union with the One as given by Plotinus (_Enn._ vi. 9,
§ 10), and compare it with Spenser's description of a similar experience
(_An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie_, 11. 253-273). Despite their poetic
melody, Spenser's words sound poor and trivial. Instead of preferring to
dwell on the unutterable ecstasy, contentment, and bliss of the
experience, he is far more anxious to emphasise the fact that "all that
pleased earst now seemes to paine."

The contradictory nature of his belief is also arresting. In the early
part of the _Hymne of Heavenly Beautie_, in-speaking of the glory of God
which is so dazzling that angels themselves may not endure His sight, he
says, as Plato does,