nature,
coupled with passionate aspiration to be absorbed in that larger life,
are the two main features of the mysticism of Richard Jefferies.

His books, and especially _The Story of my Heart_, contain, together
with the most exquisite nature description, a rich and vivid record of
sensation, feeling, and aspiration. But it is a feeling which, though
vivifying, can only be expressed in general terms, and it carries with
it no vision and no philosophy. It is almost entirely emotional, and it
is as an emotional record that it is of value, for Jefferies'
intellectual reflections are, for the most part, curiously contradictory
and unconvincing.

The certainty and rapture of this experience of spiritual emotion is all
the more amazing when we remember that the record of it was written in
agony, when he was wrecked with mortal illness and his nerves were
shattered with pain. For with him, as later with Francis Thompson,
physical pain and material trouble seemed to serve only to direct him
towards and to enhance the glory of the spiritual vision.

Chapter IV

Philosophical Mystics

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 emotions. These writers, as a rule,
though not always, are themselves markedly intellectual, and their
primary concern therefore is with truth or wisdom. Thus Donne, William
Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are all predominantly intellectual,
while Traherne, Emily Bronte, and Tennyson clothe their thoughts to some
extent in the language of philosophy.

The dominating characteristic of Donne is intellectuality; and this may
partly account for the lack in him of some essentialty mystical
qualities, more especially reverence, and that ascension of thought so
characteristic of Plato and Browning. These shortcomings are very well
illustrated in that extraordinary poem, _The, Progress of the Soul_. The
idea is a mystical one, derived from Pythagorean philosophy, and has
great possibilities, which Donne entirely fails to utilise; for, instead
of following the soul upwards on its way, he depicts it as merely
jumping about from body to body, and we are conscious of an entire lack
of any lift or grandeur of thought. This poem helps us to understand how
it was that Donne, though so richly endowed with intellectual gifts, yet
failed to reach the highest rank as a poe