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 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 Phaedrus:  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, Sec. 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.”