Mysticism in English Literature

All mystics are devotional and all are religious in the truest sense of the terms. Yet it seems legitimate to group under this special heading those writers whose views are expr...

Mysticism is a term so irresponsibly applied in English that it has become the first duty of those who use it to explain what they mean by it. The _Concise Oxford Dictionary_ (1...

experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at intervals throughout his life of "ecstasy," and it was on this he based his deepest belief. He has left...

"There are," says Plotinus, "different roads by which this end [apprehension of the Infinite] may be reached. The love of beauty, which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One...

Vaughan and Wordsworth stand pre-eminent among our English poets in being almost exclusively occupied with one theme, the mystical interpretation of nature. Both poets are of a...

The mystical sense may be called philosophical in all those writers who present their convictions in a philosophic form calculated to appeal to the intellect as well as to the e...

From this ground-belief spring all Carlyle's views and aims. Hence his gospel of hero-worship, for the "hero" is the greatest embodied "Idea" a man can know, he is a "living lig...