mysticism. It is this haunting passion which is the greatest thing in
Rossetti, which inspires all that is best in him as artist, the belief
that beauty is but the expression or symbol of something far greater and
higher, and that it has kinship with immortal things. For beauty, which,
as Plato has told us, is of all the divine ideas at once most manifest
and most lovable to man, is for Rossetti the actual and visible symbol
of love, which is at once the mystery and solution of the secret of
life.[12] Rossetti's mystical passion is perhaps most perfectly
expressed in his little early prose romance, _Hand and Soul_. It is
purer and more austere than much of his poetry, and breathes an amazing
force of spiritual vision. One wonders, after reading it, that the
writer himself did not attain to a loftier and more spiritual
development of life and art; and one cannot help feeling the reason was
that he did not sufficiently heed the warning of Plotinus, not to let
ourselves become entangled in sensuous beauty, which will engulf us as
in a swamp.

Coventry Patmore was so entirely a mystic that it seems to be the first
and the last and the only thing to say about him. His central conviction
is the unity of all things, and hence their mutual interpretation and
symbolic force. There is only one kind of knowledge which counts with
him, and that is direct apprehension or perception, the knowledge a man
has of Love, by being in love, not by reading about its symptoms. The
"touch" of God is not a figure of speech.

"Touch," says Aquinas, "applies to spiritual things as well as to
material things.... The fulness of intelligence is the obliteration
of intelligence. God is then our honey, and we, as St Augustine
says, are His; and who wants to understand honey or requires the
_rationale_ of a kiss?" (_Rod, Root, and Flower_, xx.)