piety with which our other poet-mystics, such as Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw, adorn the offices of worship.  His cast of faith, intellectual and contemplative rather than fervid, and the solitariness of his thought, forbade him to find much satisfaction in public ceremonial.  He would probably agree with Galen, who in a very remarkable passage says that the study of nature, if prosecuted with the same earnestness and intensity which men bring to the contemplation of the “Mysteries,” is even more fitted than they to reveal the power and wisdom of God; for “the symbolism of the mysteries is more obscure than that of nature.”

He shows his affinity with the modern spirit in his firm grasp of natural law.  Like George Fox and William Law, he had to face the shock of giving up his belief in arbitrary interferences.  There was a period when he lost his young faculty of generalisation; when he bowed before the inexorable dooms of an unknown Lawgiver—­“the categorical imperative,” till the gift of intuition was restored to him in fuller measure.  This experience explains his attitude towards natural science.  His reverence for facts never failed him; “the sanctity and truth of nature,” he says, “must not be tricked out with accidental ornaments”; but he looked askance at the science which tries to erect itself into a philosophy.  Physics, he saw plainly, is an abstract study:  its view of the world is an abstraction for certain purposes, and possesses less truth than the view of the poet.[371] And yet he looked forward to a time when science, too, shall be touched with fire from the altar;—­

  “Then her heart shall kindle; her dull eye,
   Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang
   Chained to its object in brute slavery.”

And in a remarkable passage of the “Prefaces” he says “If the time should ever come when that which is now called science shall be ready to put on as it were a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his Divine spirit to aid the transformation, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.”  He feels that the loving and disinterested study of nature’s laws must at last issue, not in materialism, but in some high and spiritual faith, inspired by the Word of God, who is Himself, as Erigena said, “the Nature of all things.”

In aloofness and loneliness of mind he is exceeded by no mystic of the cloister.  It may be said far more truly of him than of Milton, that “his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.”  In his youth he confesses that human beings had only a secondary interest for him;[372] and though he says that Nature soon led him to man, it was to man as a “unity,” as “one spirit,” that he was drawn, not to men as individuals.[373] Herein he resembled many other contemplative mystics; but it has been said truly that “it is easier to know man in general than a man in particular.[374]” The sage who “sits in the centre” of his being, and there “enjoys bright day,[375]” does not really know human beings as persons.