These little tracts are written by a practical mystic, one who was able to describe with peculiar accuracy and vividness the physical and psychological sensations accompanying mystical initiation. The Cloud of Unknowing is an application in simple English of the Dionysian teaching of concentration joined to the practice of contemplation taught by Richard of St Victor, and it describes very clearly the preliminary struggles and bewilderment of the soul.  The Epistle of Privy Counsel (still in MS.) is the most advanced in mystical teaching:  the writer in it tries to explain very intimately the nature of “onehede with God,” and to give instruction in simple and yet deeply subtle terms as to the means for attaining this.

There is a mystical strain in other writings of this time, the most notable from the point of view of literature being in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem of Piers the Plowman.[67] This is mystical throughout in tone, more especially in the idea of the journey of the soul in search of Truth, only to find, after many dangers and disciplines and adventures, that—­

    If grace graunte the to go in this wise,
    Thow shalt see in thi-selve Treuthe sitte in thine herte
    In a cheyne of charyte as thow a childe were.[68]

Moreover, the vision of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, bears a definite analogy to the three stages of the mystic’s path, as will be seen if the description of the qualities of these three are examined, as they are given in B., Passus viii. 11. 78-102.

* * * * *

Crashaw, George Herbert, and Christopher Harvey all alike sound the personal note in their religious poems.  All three writers describe the love of the soul for God in the terms of passionate human love:  Crashaw with an ardour which has never been surpassed, Herbert with a homely intimacy quite peculiar to him, and Christopher Harvey with a point and epigrammatic setting which serve only to enhance the deep feeling of the thought.

In many a lyric of flaming passion Crashaw expresses his love-longing for his God, and he describes in terms only matched by his spiritual descendant, Francis Thompson, the desire of God to win the human soul.

    Let not my Lord, the mighty lover
    Of soules, disdain that I discover
       The hidden art
    Of his high stratagem to win your heart,
       It was his heavnly art
       Kindly to crosse you
       In your mistaken love,
       That, at the next remove
       Thence he might tosse you
       And strike your troubled heart
          Home to himself.[69]

The main feature of Herbert’s poetry is the religious love lyric, the cry of the individual soul to God.  This is the mystical quality in his verse, which is quieter and far less musical than Crashaw’s, but which possesses at times a tender fragrance and freshness, as in the little poem Love.