" In the fourteenth century we have a group of such
writers of great power and beauty, and in the work of Richard Rolle,
Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the author of the _Cloud of
Unknowing_, we have a body of writings dealing with the inner life, and
the steps of purification, contemplation, and ecstatic union which throb
with life and devotional fervour.
From the time of Julian of Norwich, who was still alive in 1413, we
find practically no literature of a mystical type until we come to
Spenser's _Hymns_ (1596), and these embody a Platonism reached largely
through the intellect, and not a mystic experience. It would seem at
first sight as if these hymns, or at any rate the two later ones in
honour of Heavenly Love and of Heavenly Beauty, should rank as some of
the finest mystical verse in English. Yet this is not the case. They are
saturated with the spirit of Plato, and they express in musical form the
lofty ideas of the _Symposium_ and the _Phaedrus_: that beauty, more
nearly than any other earthly thing, resembles its heavenly prototype,
and that therefore the sight of it kindles love, which is the excitement
and rapture aroused in the soul by the remembrance of that divine beauty
which once it knew.
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