quaintness, and pure flame of enthusiasm, but these works cannot as a
whole be ranked as literature. Then we have the little group of
Cambridge Platonists, Henry More, John Smith, Benjamin Whichcote, and
John Norris of Bemerton. These are all Platonic philosophers, and among
their writings, and especially in those of John Norris, are many
passages of mystical thought clothed in noble prose. Henry More, who is
also a poet, is in character a typical mystic, serene, buoyant, and so
spiritually happy that, as he told a friend, he was sometimes "almost
mad with pleasure." His poetical faculty is, however, entirely
subordinated to his philosophy, and the larger portion of his work
consists of passages from the _Enneads_ of Plotinus turned into rather
obscure verse. So that he is not a poet and artist who, working in the
sphere of the imagination, can directly present to us mystical thoughts
and ideas, but rather a mystic philosopher who has versified some of his
discourses. At this time also many of the "metaphysical poets" are
mystical in much of their thought. Chief among these is John Donne, and
we may also include Henry Vaughan, Traherne, Crashaw, and George
Herbert.

Bunyan might at first sight appear to have many of the characteristics
of the mystic, for he had certain very intense psychic experiences which
are of the nature of a direct revelation of God to the soul; and in his
vivid religious autobiography, _Grace Abounding_, he records sensations
which are akin to those felt by Rolle, Julian, and many others. But
although psychically akin, he is in truth widely separated from the
mystics in spirit and temperament and belief. He is a Puritan,
overwhelmed with a sense of sin, the horrors of punishment in hell, and
the wrath of an outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at
escape from this wrath through "election" and God's grace. But he is a
Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament sensitive to the point