This thrilling consciousness of spiritual life felt through nature, coupled with passionate aspiration to be absorbed in that larger life, are the two main features of the mysticism of Richard Jefferies.

His books, and especially The Story of my Heart, contain, together with the most exquisite nature description, a rich and vivid record of sensation, feeling, and aspiration.  But it is a feeling which, though vivifying, can only be expressed in general terms, and it carries with it no vision and no philosophy.  It is almost entirely emotional, and it is as an emotional record that it is of value, for Jefferies’ intellectual reflections are, for the most part, curiously contradictory and unconvincing.

The certainty and rapture of this experience of spiritual emotion is all the more amazing when we remember that the record of it was written in agony, when he was wrecked with mortal illness and his nerves were shattered with pain.  For with him, as later with Francis Thompson, physical pain and material trouble seemed to serve only to direct him towards and to enhance the glory of the spiritual vision.

Chapter IV

Philosophical Mystics

The mystical sense may be called philosophical in all those writers who present their convictions in a philosophic form calculated to appeal to the intellect as well as to the emotions.  These writers, as a rule, though not always, are themselves markedly intellectual, and their primary concern therefore is with truth or wisdom.  Thus Donne, William Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are all predominantly intellectual, while Traherne, Emily Bronte, and Tennyson clothe their thoughts to some extent in the language of philosophy.

The dominating characteristic of Donne is intellectuality; and this may partly account for the lack in him of some essentialty mystical qualities, more especially reverence, and that ascension of thought so characteristic of Plato and Browning.  These shortcomings are very well illustrated in that extraordinary poem, The, Progress of the Soul.  The idea is a mystical one, derived from Pythagorean philosophy, and has great possibilities, which Donne entirely fails to utilise; for, instead of following the soul upwards on its way, he depicts it as merely jumping about from body to body, and we are conscious of an entire lack of any lift or grandeur of thought.  This poem helps us to understand how it was that Donne, though so richly endowed with intellectual gifts, yet failed to reach the highest rank as a poet.  He was brilliant in particulars, but lacked the epic qualities of breadth, unity, and proportion, characteristics destined to be the distinctive marks of the school of which he is looked upon as the founder.

Apart from this somewhat important defect, Donne’s attitude of mind is essentially mystical.  This is especially marked in his feeling about the body and natural law, in his treatment of love, and in his conception of woman.  The mystic’s postulate—­if we could know ourselves, we should know all—­is often on Donne’s lips, as for instance in that curious poem written in memory of Elizabeth Drury, on the second anniversary of her death.  It is perhaps best expressed in the following verse: