poetry is the religious love lyric, the
cry of the individual soul to God. This is the mystical quality in his
verse, which is quieter and far less musical than Crashaw's, but which
possesses at times a tender fragrance and freshness, as in the little
poem _Love_.

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 sp