it comes,
    Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. 
    Let mystic deaths wait on it, and wise souls be
    The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. 
    O sweet incendiary! show here thy art
    Upon this carcase of a hard, cold heart;
    Let all thy scattered shafts of light, that play
    Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
    Combined against this breast at once break in,
    And take away from me myself and sin;
    This glorious robbery shall thy bounty be,
    And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. 
    O thou undaunted daughter of desires! 
    By all thy dower of lights and fires,
    By all the eagle in thee, all the dove,
    By all thy lives and deaths of love,
    By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
    And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
    By all thy brim-fill’d bowls of fierce desire,
    By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire,
    By the full kingdom of that final kiss
    That seized thy parting soul and seal’d thee His;
    By all the heavens thou hast in Him,
    Fair sister of the seraphim! 
    By all of Him we have in Thee,
    Leave nothing of myself in me: 
    Let me so read thy life, that I
    Unto all life of mine may die.”

CRASHAW, On St. Teresa.

“In a dark night,
Burning with ecstasies wherein I fell,
Oh happy plight,
Unheard I left the house wherein I dwell,
The inmates sleeping peacefully and well.

“Secure from sight;
By unknown ways, in unknown robes concealed,
Oh happy plight;
And to no eye revealed,
My home in sleep as in the tomb was sealed.

“Sweet night, in whose blessed fold
No human eye beheld me, and mine eye
None could behold. 
Only for Guide had I
His Face whom I desired so ardently.”

ST. JUAN OF THE CROSS (translated by Hutchings).

PRACTICAL AND DEVOTIONAL MYSTICISM—­continued

“Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.  My flesh and my heart faileth:  but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”—­Ps. lxxiii. 25, 26.

We have seen that the leaders of the Reformation in Germany thrust aside speculative Mysticism with impatience.  Nor did Christian Platonism fare much better in the Latin countries.  There were students of Plotinus in Italy in the sixteenth century, who fancied that a revival of humane letters, and a better acquaintance with philosophy, were the best means of combating the barbaric enthusiasms of the North.  But these Italian Neoplatonists had, for the most part, no deep religious feelings, and they did not exhibit in their lives that severity which the Alexandrian philosophers had practised.  And so, when Rome had need of a Catholic mystical revival to stem the tide of Protestantism, she could not find what she required among the scholars and philosophers of the Papal court.  The Mysticism of the counter-Reformation had its centre in Spain.