a reflection of a truth which we are not capable of apprehending in any other way.  Nettleship points out, for instance, that bread can only be itself, can only be food, by entering into something else, assimilating and being assimilated, and that the more it loses itself (what it began by being) the more it “finds itself” (what it is intended to be).  If we follow carefully the analysis Nettleship makes of the action of bread in the physical world, we can see that to the man of mystic temper it throws more light than do volumes of sermons on what seems sometimes a hard saying, and what is at the same time the ultimate mystical counsel, “He that loveth his life shall lose it.”

It is worth while, in this connection, to ponder the constant use Christ makes of nature symbolism, drawing the attention of His hearers to the analogies in the law we see working around us to the same law working in the spiritual world.  The yearly harvest, the sower and his seed, the leaven in the loaf, the grain of mustard-seed, the lilies of the field, the action of fire, worms, moth, rust, bread, wine, and water, the mystery of the wind, unseen and yet felt—­each one of these is shown to contain and exemplify a great and abiding truth.

This is the attitude, these are the things, which lie at the heart of mysticism.  In the light of this, nothing in the world is trivial, nothing is unimportant nothing is common or unclean.  It is the feeling that Blake has crystallised in the lines: 

    To see a world in a grain of sand
    And a Heaven in a wild flower,
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
    And Eternity in an hour.

The true mystic then, in the full sense of the term, is one who knows there is unity under diversity at the centre of all existence, and he knows it by the most perfect of all tests for the person concerned, because he has felt it.  True mysticism—­and this cannot be over-emphasised—­is an experience and a life.  It is an experimental science, and, as Patmore has said, it is as incommunicable to those who have not experienced it as is the odour of a violet to those who have never smelt one.  In its highest consummation it is the supreme adventure of the soul:  to use the matchless words of Plotinus, it is “the flight of the Alone to the Alone.”

As distinguished, therefore, from the mystical thinker or philosopher, the practical mystic has direct knowledge of a truth which for him is absolute.  He consequently has invariably acted upon this knowledge, as inevitably as the blind man to whom sight had been granted would make use of his eyes.

Among English writers and poets the only two who fulfil this strict definition of a mystic are Wordsworth and Blake.  But we are not here concerned primarily with a study of those great souls who are mystics in the full and supreme sense of the word.  For an examination of their lives and vision Evelyn Underhill’s valuable book should be consulted.  Our object is to examine very briefly the chief English writers—­men of letters and poets—­whose inmost principle is rooted in mysticism, or whose work is on the whole so permeated by mystical thought that their attitude of mind is not fully to be understood apart from it.