Naturally it is with the poets we find the most complete and continuous expression of mystical thought and inspiration.  Naturally, because it has ever been the habit of the English race to clothe their profoundest thought and their highest aspiration in poetic form.  We do not possess a Plato, a Kant, or a Descartes, but we have Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Browning.  And further, as the essence of mysticism is to believe that everything we see and know is symbolic of something greater, mysticism is on one side the poetry of life.  For poetry, also, consists in finding resemblances, and universalises the particulars with which it deals.  Hence the utterances of the poets on mystical philosophy are peculiarly valuable.  The philosopher approaches philosophy directly, the poet obliquely; but the indirect teaching of a poet touches us more profoundly than the direct lesson of a moral treatise, because the latter appeals principally to our reason, whereas the poet touches our “transcendental feeling.”

So it is that mysticism underlies the thought of most of our great poets, of nearly all our greatest poets, if we except Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Byron.  Shakespeare must be left on one side, first, because the dramatic form does not lend itself to the expression of mystical feeling, and secondly, because even in the poems there is little real mysticism, though there is much of the fashionable Platonism.  Shakespeare is metaphysical rather than mystical, the difference being, roughly, that the metaphysician seeks to know the beginnings or causes of things, whereas the mystic feels he knows the end of things, that all nature is leading up to union with the One.

We shall find that mystical thought, and the mystical attitude, are curiously persistent in English literature, and that although it seems out of keeping with our “John Bull” character, the English race has a marked tendency towards mysticism.  What we do find lacking in England is the purely philosophical and speculative spirit of the detached and unprejudiced seeker after truth.  The English mind is anti-speculative; it cares little for metaphysics; it prefers theology and a given authority.  English mystics have, as a rule, dealt little with the theoretical side of mysticism, the aspect for instance with which Plotinus largely deals.  They have been mainly practical mystics, such as William Law.  Those of the poets who have consciously had a system and desired to impart it, have done so from the practical point of view, urging, like Wordsworth, the importance of contemplation and meditation, or, like Blake, the value of cultivating the imagination; and in both cases enforcing the necessity of cleansing the inner life, if we are to become conscious of our divine nature and our great heritage.