Christopher Harvey, the friend of Izaak Walton and the admirer of Herbert, has in his poems some lines which breathe almost as rapturous a passion of spiritual love as anything in Crashaw.  Such is his epigram on the Insatiableness of the Heart.

    The whole round world is not enough to fill
    The heart’s three corners; but it craveth still. 
    Onely the Trinity, that made it, can
    Suffice the vast-triangled heart of man.[70]

Or again, in a later epigram in the same poem (The School of the Heart), he puts the main teaching of Plotinus and of all mystics into four pregnant lines—­

    My busie stirring heart, that seekes the best,
    Can find no place on earth wherein to rest;
    For God alone, the Author of its blisse,
    Its only rest, its onely center is.

But it is Crashaw who, of these three, shares in fullest measure the passion of the great Catholic mystics, and more especially of St Teresa, whom he seems almost to have worshipped.  His hymn to her “name and honor” is one of the great English poems; it burns with spiritual flame, it soars with noble desire.  Near the beginning of it, Crashaw has, in six simple lines, pictured the essential mystic attitude of action, not necessarily or consciously accompanied by either a philosophy or a theology.  He is speaking of Teresa’s childish attempt to run away and become a martyr among the Moors.

    She never undertook to know
    What death with love should have to doe;
    Nor has she e’re yet understood
    Why to shew love, she should shed blood
    Yet though she cannot tell you why,
    She can LOVE, and she can DY.

Spiritual love has never been more rapturously sung than in this marvellous hymn.  Little wonder that it haunted Coleridge’s memory, and that its deep emotion and rich melody stimulated his poet’s ear and imagination to write Christabel.[71] Crashaw’s influence also on Patmore, more especially on the Sponsa Dei, as well as later on Francis Thompson, is unmistakable.

William Blake is one of the great mystics of the world; and he is by far the greatest and most profound who has spoken in English.  Like Henry More and Wordsworth, he lived in a world of glory, of spirit and of vision, which, for him, was the only real world.  At the age of four he saw God looking in at the window, and from that time until he welcomed the approach of death by singing songs of joy which made the rafters ring, he lived in an atmosphere of divine illumination.  The material facts of his career were simple and uneventful.  He was an engraver by profession, poet and painter by choice, mystic and seer by nature.  From the outer point of view his life was a failure.  He was always crippled by poverty, almost wholly unappreciated in the world of art and letters of his day, consistently misunderstood even by his best friends, and pronounced mad by those who most admired his work.  Yet, like all true mystics, he was radiantly happy and serene; rich in the midst of poverty.  For he lived and worked in a world, and amongst a company, little known of ordinary men:—­