in uninspired writing," and he asserts that he never tires of reading
him, "he is unfathomably profound and yet simple."[8]

Whatever may be the source or reason, it is clear that at the end of the
eighteenth century we begin to find a mystical tinge of thought in
several thinkers and writers, such as Burke, Coleridge, and Thomas
Erskine of Linlathen. This increases in the early nineteenth century,
strengthened by the influence, direct and indirect, of Boehme,
Swedenborg, and the German transcendental philosophers and this mystical
spirit is very marked in Carlyle, and, as we shall see, in most of the
greatest nineteenth-century poets.

In addition to those writers which are here dealt with in detail, there
is much of the mystic spirit in others of the same period, to name a few
only, George Meredith, "Fiona Macleod," Christina Rossetti, and Mrs
Browning; while to-day writers like "A. E.," W. B. Yeats, and Evelyn
Underhill are carrying on the mystic tradition.




Chapter II

Love and Beauty Mystics



In studying the mysticism of the English writers, and more especially of
the poets, one is at once struck by the diversity of approach leading to
unity of end.